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Vale has non-deterministic behavior #476
Description
It seems that vale, under certain condition produces a non-deterministic output. It sometimes finds an error, and sometimes not.
I prepared a small repository which allows to reproduce the behaviour
git clone https://github.com/mrjerzy/vale-error.git
cd vale-error
while true; do vale . ; done;Running vale, sometimes finds an error, and sometimes not.
I run vale version 2.20.0, installed via nix package manager, on macOS Monterey 12.3.1. I can reproduce the same error with the official jdkato/vale Docker images back to image version v2.10.2. Version v2.9.1 does not recognise the .vale.ini syntax anymore.
Overview
I tried to create some style rules, which make sure that a series of words is always written in upper case, and has a dash inbetween.
I tried to define that this-is, this is, this - is will all be marked to be substituted by This-Is.
Further i want to achieve that a 3rd word Unexpected is added with a hyphen and is attached with a dash.
I defined following Rule:
extends: substitution
message: Use '%s' instead of '%s'
level: error
scope: [paragraph, sentence]
ignorecase: false
swap:
'[tT]his[ -]*[iI]s': This-Is
'This-Is[ -]*[uU]nexpected': This-Is-Unexpected
Further I added a file containing:
This-Is unexpected
According to the rule it should be substitited for This-Is-Unexpected.
When i run vale multiple time, vale sometimes reports an error, and sometimes not.
Bash Output
> while true; do vale . ; done;
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
docs/overview.md
1:1 error Use 'This-Is-Unexpected' Rules.Repositories
instead of 'This-Is
unexpected'
✖ 1 error, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
docs/overview.md
1:1 error Use 'This-Is-Unexpected' Rules.Repositories
instead of 'This-Is
unexpected'
✖ 1 error, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
docs/overview.md
1:1 error Use 'This-Is-Unexpected' Rules.Repositories
instead of 'This-Is
unexpected'
✖ 1 error, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
✔ 0 errors, 0 warnings and 0 suggestions in 1 file.
The behaviour of vale is non-deterministic in that case.
I realised that this does not happen if i remove the first substitution rule.
Activity
jdkato commentedon Aug 27, 2022
It depends on the order in which the patterns are loaded: If the first one is loaded first, there's no alert since
This-Is == This-Is. If the second one is loaded first, then there's an alert.The assumption is that once we find a match, we don't need to continue to try patterns. If you have overlapping patterns that should always be evaluated, then you should create two separate
.ymlfiles.Also, you should only add
scope: paragraphorscope: sentenceif the rule requires information from that scope (such as sentence length, for example) and they shouldn't be used together (it's just going to result in worse performance).In a case like this, the default
scope: textis what should be used.