Convert HTML back to Markdown for editing in wmd

Question

I am curious to do what happens when you edit a post on this site.

I am using wmd for my markdown editor, of course when I goto edit, I get the HTML it generated not the markdown like on stackoverflow. Now, is there a way I can store both? or is it reliable enough to simply convert the HTML back to markdown to show in the wmd editor?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Look at the optionsExample.html in your WMD distribution. There's an option to send the result to the server as Markdown.

Answer 2

Actually, I have seen how to get one or the other, but then I need to convert it to HTML everytime I display it. IS that they best way to go? Either way I think I am in the same boat. Seems more efficent to convert it back only when editing

Answer 3

As Chris notes, you can send Markdown to the server so you can store it there as such. I started trying to use MarkdownJ to convert on the server-side, but it doesn't (at the time of this writing) convert images to HTML correctly and so I ended up going with Java 6 Scripting: Rhino engine + showdown.js. Since WMD uses showdown.js you get the same Markdown-to-HTML transformation. Works like a charm (for Java 6, anyway).

Answer 4

If you want to convert HTML to Markdown in batch, I can recommend Aaron Swartz’s html2text.py Python script with which you can just:

cat my.html | python html2text.py # outputs markdown