basic-usage.md

layout	title	description	redirect_from
default	Basic Usage	Basic usage of the CommonMark parser	/0.20/basic-usage/

Basic Usage

The CommonMarkConverter class provides a simple wrapper for converting CommonMark to HTML:

<?php

use League\CommonMark\CommonMarkConverter;

$converter = new CommonMarkConverter();
echo $converter->convertToHtml('# Hello World!');

// <h1>Hello World!</h1>

Important: See the security section for important details on avoiding security misconfigurations.

The actual conversion process has three steps:

1. Creating an Environment, adding whichever extensions/parser/renders you need
2. Parsing the Markdown input into an AST
3. Rendering the AST document as HTML

CommonMarkConverter handles this for you, but you can execute that process yourself if you wish:

<?php

use League\CommonMark\DocParser;
use League\CommonMark\Environment;
use League\CommonMark\HtmlRenderer;

$environment = Environment::createCommonMarkEnvironment();
$parser = new DocParser($environment);
$htmlRenderer = new HtmlRenderer($environment);

$markdown = '# Hello World!';

$document = $parser->parse($markdown);
echo $htmlRenderer->renderBlock($document);

// <h1>Hello World!</h1>

Additional customization is also possible.

Supported Character Encodings

Please note that only UTF-8 and ASCII encodings are supported. If your Markdown uses a different encoding please convert it to UTF-8 before running it through this library.