What's the easiest way to convert an SO data dump from HTML back to Markdown?

Question

I've just got my hands on a Stackoverflow data dump, and I'm disappointed to see that the Body field of the posts is in HTML rather than Markdown. I suspect there's Markdown in the original database because that's what I see if I try to edit an answer.

I want to recover Markdown from a large set of answers. I will be processing hundreds of entries in batch mode, using either command-line tools or some kind of Lua or C library, so an interactive tool like the wmd Markdown editor is not suitable. Can people say what tools are available to help me recover Markdown from a Stackoverflow data dump?

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(Related question, not a duplicate: Convert HTML back to Markdown within wmd.)

Answer 1

Markdownify converts HTML to Markdown.

See Also: MetaSO / Can Markdown be recovered from the SO data dump?

Answer 2

take a look at pandoc:http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

there is an html2markdown tool included with pandoc that works pretty well, and the program is run from the command line, making batch conversion quite nice.

here is the man page: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/html2markdown.1.html