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markdown-js | ||
=========== | ||
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Yet another markdown parser, this time for JavaScript. There's a few | ||
options that precede this project but they all treat markdown to HTML | ||
conversion as a single step process. You pass markdown in and get HTML | ||
out, end of story. We had some pretty particular views on how the | ||
process should actually look, which include: | ||
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* producing well-formed HTML. This means that em and strong nesting is | ||
important, as is the ability to output as both HTML and XHTML | ||
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* having an intermediate representation to allow processing of parsed | ||
data (we in fact have two, both [JsonML]: a markdown tree and an | ||
HTML tree) | ||
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* being easily extensible to add new dialects without having to | ||
rewrite the entire parsing mechanics | ||
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* having a good test suite. The only test suites we could find tested | ||
massive blocks of input, and passing depended on outputting the HTML | ||
with exactly the same whitespace as the original implementation | ||
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[JsonML]: http://jsonml.org/ "JSON Markup Language" | ||
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## Usage | ||
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The simple way to use it with CommonJS is: | ||
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var input = "# Heading\n\nParagraph"; | ||
var output = require( "markdown" ).toHTML( input ); | ||
print( output ); | ||
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If you want more control check out the documentation in | ||
[lib/markdown.js] which details all the methods and parameters | ||
available (including examples!). One day we'll get the docs generated | ||
and hosted somewhere for nicer browsing. | ||
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We're yet to try it out in a browser, though it's high up on our list of | ||
things to sort out for this project. | ||
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[lib/markdown.js]: http://github.com/evilstreak/markdown-js/blob/master/lib/markdown.js | ||
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## Intermediate Representation | ||
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Internally the process to convert a chunk of markdown into a chunk of | ||
HTML has three steps: | ||
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1. Parse the markdown into a JsonML tree. Any references found in the | ||
parsing are stored in the attribute hash of the root node under the | ||
key `references`. | ||
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2. Convert the markdown tree into an HTML tree. Rename any nodes that | ||
need it (`bulletlist` to `ul` for example) and lookup any references | ||
used by links or images. Remove the references attribute once done. | ||
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3. Stringify the HTML tree being careful not to wreck whitespace where | ||
whitespace is important (surrounding inline elements for example). | ||
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Each step of this process can be called individually if you need to do | ||
some processing or modification of the data at an intermediate stage. | ||
For example, you may want to grab a list of all URLs linked to in the | ||
document before rendering it to HTML which you could do by recursing | ||
through the HTML tree looking for `a` nodes. |