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CommonMark

CommonMark is a rationalized version of Markdown syntax, with a spec and BSD3-licensed reference implementations in C and JavaScript.

For more information, see http://commonmark.org.

To play with this library without installing it, see the live dingus at http://spec.commonmark.org/dingus.html.

Installing

You can install the library using npm:

npm install commonmark

This package includes the commonmark library and a command-line executable, commonmark.

For client-side use, you can do make browserify to produce a standalone JavaScript file js/commonmark.js, suitable for linking into a web page, or just fetch http://spec.commonmark.org/js/commonmark.js.

To run tests for the JavaScript library:

make testjs

To run benchmarks against some other JavaScript converters:

npm install showdown marked markdown-it
make benchjs

To start an interactive dingus that you can use to try out the library:

make dingus

Usage

Instead of converting Markdown directly to HTML, as most converters do, commonmark.js parses Markdown to an AST (abstract syntax tree), and then renders this AST as HTML. This opens up the possibility of manipulating the AST between parsing and rendering. For example, one could transform emphasis into ALL CAPS.

Here's a basic usage example:

var reader = new commonmark.DocParser();
var writer = new commonmark.HtmlRenderer();
var parsed = reader.parse("Hello *world*"); // parsed is a 'Node' tree
var result = writer.render(parsed);  // result is a string