BlueCloth

Forked by Mislav on April 9, 2008

This is a fork of BlueCloth 1.0.0 (2004/08/24) from its trunk. It's been created to finally fix some of the outstanding bugs in its abandoned implementation.

The plan is to first clean up the messy test suite (using RSpec), make existing tests pass (a lot of them fail right now) and, finally, add tests for annoying bugs and making them pass also. Feel free to help out.

I also want to break down its implementation not to be entirely contained in one file ("lib/bluecloth.rb") anymore. Together with a nicer test suite, that will probably make it easier to maintain.

About

Original version by John Gruber http://daringfireball.net/.
Ruby port by Michael Granger http://www.deveiate.org/.

BlueCloth is a Ruby implementation of Markdown, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. To quote from the project page: Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

It borrows a naming convention and several helpings of interface from Redcloth, Why the Lucky Stiff's processor for a similar text-to-HTML conversion syntax called Textile.

Installation

You can install this module either by running the included install.rb script, or by simply copying lib/bluecloth.rb to a directory in your load path.

Dependencies

BlueCloth uses the StringScanner class from the strscan library, which comes with Ruby 1.8.x and later or may be downloaded from the RAA for earlier versions, and the logger library, which is also included in 1.8.x and later.

Example Usage

The BlueCloth class is a subclass of Ruby's String, and can be used thusly:

bc = BlueCloth::new( str )
puts bc.to_html

This README file is an example of Markdown syntax. The sample program bluecloth in the bin/ directory can be used to convert this (or any other) file with Markdown syntax into HTML:

$ bin/bluecloth README > README.html

Acknowledgements

This library is a port of the canonical Perl one, and so owes most of its functionality to its author, John Gruber. The bugs in this code are most certainly an artifact of my porting it and not an artifact of the excellent code from which it is derived.

It also, as mentioned before, borrows its API liberally from RedCloth, both for compatibility's sake, and because I think Why's code is beautiful. His excellent code and peerless prose have been an inspiration to me, and this module is intended as the sincerest flattery.

Also contributing to any success this module may enjoy are those among my peers who have taken the time to help out, either by submitting patches, testing, or offering suggestions and review:

• Martin Chase stillflame@FaerieMUD.org
• Florian Gross flgr@ccan.de