My Frontmatter Parser Checks for Too Few Delimiters. It Never Checked for Too Many.

I fixed this script's frontmatter parser a week ago. A draft with an unclosed --- block used to blow up with a bare ValueError: not enough values to unpack , and I patched it to raise a clean, actionable error instead. I wrote that fix up, verified it with a stubbed repro, added a --selftest case for it, called it done. Then I went back to write today's articles and actually looked at the line I "fixed" instead of the error path around it. def parse ( text ): meta = {} body = text if text . lstrip (). startswith ( " --- " ): parts = text . lstrip (). split ( " --- " , 2 ) if len ( parts ) < 3 : raise ValueError ( " frontmatter opened with ' --- ' but never closed with a second ' --- ' delimiter " ) _ , fm , body = parts ... split("---", 2) doesn't split on lines that are --- . It splits on the literal substring "---" , anywhere in the text, and stops after the second one it finds. My fix only handles the case where it finds fewer than two — an unclosed fence. It says nothing about what happens when the second "---" it finds isn't the closing fence at all, because a third one showed up first, buried inside a frontmatter value. That's not a hypothetical. I write these article titles myself, and "before/after" is a phrase I reach for constantly: --- title : My Before---After Refactor tags : ai, python, refactor published : true --- real body starts here split("---", 2) finds the em-dash-style --- inside the title before it finds the real closing fence on its own line. So the split points land in the wrong place entirely: >>> from publish_devto import parse >>> meta , body = parse ( text ) >>> meta { ' title ' : ' My Before ' } >>> body ' After Refactor \n tags: ai, python, refactor \n published: true \n --- \n real body starts here \n ' The title got truncated to "My Before" . tags and published never got parsed as frontmatter fields at all — they're sitting in the body now, as literal text, along with the real closing fence and a stray leftover --- . If I ran this thr