Read a code span that survives a line break as one identifier

[aaddrick]

INLINE_CODE in tests/test_readmes.py was anchored to the line. A span that wraps — ordinary in files hard-wrapped at 80 columns, and rendered by Markdown as a single identifier — is therefore not matched at all, and the regex pairs that span's closing backtick with the next span's opening one instead. The census gains a phantom entry made of the prose between them, and loses the two real identifiers it existed to pin.

Demonstrated by reverting the pattern with the new tests in place:

AssertionError: Counter({' and check for ': 1})
             != Counter({'claude plugin list': 1, 'enabled': 1})

A translation cannot reproduce that phantom entry without leaving the clause in English, so the multiset test ends up demanding the one thing it exists to forbid. The sibling repository slushpile hit this on a troubleshooting page and two translators duly shipped "and check for" mid-sentence in Portuguese and Vietnamese, each correctly reporting they had no legal alternative.

Nothing here is currently mispinned

Verified by computing the old and the new census across all six READMEs: 32 spans each, identical under both. No span in these files wraps today.

That is the reason to fix it now rather than a reason not to. The gate is exact by accident, and the accident ends the first time somebody rewraps a paragraph — in a commit that looks like prose editing and that nobody would think to check the census against.

The fix

The pattern now allows a newline, and the census normalizes whitespace so a translation that fits the identifier on one line matches an English one that does not.

Fences are stripped first, and that half is load bearing: without it, a newline-tolerant pattern pairs the backticks of two fence delimiters and swallows the whole block as a single enormous span. Fence content is compared verbatim by its own test, so the census loses nothing by not reading it.

The new tests assert on constructed strings

CensusTest does not read the READMEs, because the failure is one no current README exhibits. A gate whose only evidence is that the tree happens to pass it cannot be seen to work — which is exactly how this one was silently exact for the wrong reason. One assertion does read README.md, to catch a helper that returned nothing and would otherwise pass every other case.

Gates

All four green: sync_style --check, check_configs, run_evals validate, and 80 tests. The diff is one file.

https://claude.ai/code/session_01TfLpzhGer85CKJ2fZpvLN8