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