How would you go about parsing markdown?

Question

You can find the syntax here.

The thing is, the source that follows with the download is written in perl. Which I have no intentions of honoring. It is riddled with regex and it relies on MD5 hashes to escape certain characters. Something is just wrong about that!

I'm about to hard code a parser for markdown and I'm wonder if someone had some experience with this?

Edit:

If you don't have anything meaningful to say about the actual parsing of markdown, spare me the time. (This might sound harsh, but yes, I'm looking for insight, not a solution i.e. third-party library).

To help a bit with the answers, regex are meant to identify patterns! NOT to parse an entire grammar. That people consider doing so is foobar.

• If you think about markdown, it's fundamentally based around the concept of paragraphs.
• As such, a reasonable approach might be to split the input into paragraphs.
• There are many kinds of paragraphs e.g. heading, text, list, blockquote, code.
• The challenge is thus to identify these paragraphs and in what context they occur.

I'll be back with a solution, once I find it's worthy to be shared.

Answer 1

If Perl isn't your thing, there are Markdown implementations in at least 10 other languages. They probably don't all have 100% compatibility, but tend to be pretty close.

Answer 2

I'd probably read the syntax specification enough times to know it, and get a feel for how to parse it.

Reading the existing parser code is of course brilliant, both to see what seems to be the main source of complexity, and if any special clever tricks are being used. The use of MD5 checksumming seems a bit weird, but I haven't studied the code enough to understand why it's being done. A comment in a routine called _EscapeSpecialChars() states:

We're replacing each such character with its corresponding MD5 checksum value; this is likely overkill, but it should prevent us from colliding with the escape values by accident.

Replacing a single character by a full MD5 does seem extravagant, but perhaps it really makes sense.

Of course, it'd be clever to consider creating a "true" syntax, for a tool such as Flex to get out of the regex bog.

Answer 3

Here you can find a Javascript-implementation of Markdown. It also relies heavily on Regexes, as this is just the fastest and easiest way to parse the text.

But it spares the MD5 part.

I cannot help directly with the coding of the parsing but maybe this link can help you one way or another.

Answer 4

There are libraries available in a number of languages, including php, ruby, java, c#, javascript. I'd suggest looking at some of these for ideas.

It depends on which language you wish to use, for the best way to implement it, there will be idiomatic and non idiomatic ways to do it.

Regexes work in perl, because perl and regex are best friends.

Answer 5

If you are using a programming language that has more than three other users, you should be able to find a library to parse it for you. A quick Google-ing reveals libraries for CL, Haskell, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and so on. It is highly unlikely that you will need to reinvent this wheel.

If you really have to write it from scratch, I recommend writing a proper parser. With this technique, you won't have to escape things with MD5 hashes. (I agree that if you have to do something like this, it's time to reconsider your design.)

Answer 6

Markdown is a JAWL (just another wiki language)

There are plenty of open source wiki's out there that you can examine the code of the parser. Most use REGEX

Check out the screwturn wiki, is has an interesting multi pass formatter pipeline, a very nice technique - see /core/Formatter.cs and /core/FormatterPipeline.cs

Best is to use/join an existing project, these sorts of things are always much harder than they appear

Answer 7

If I was to try to parse markdown (and its extension Markdown extra) I think I would try to use a state machine and parse it one char at a time, linking together some internal structures representing bits of text as I go along then, once all is parsed, generating the output from the objects all stringed together.

Basically, I'd build a mini-DOM-like tree as I read the input file.
To generate an output, I would just traverse the tree and output HTML or anything else (PS, LaTex, RTF,...)

Things that can increase complexity:

• The fact that you can mix HTML and markdown, although the rule could be easy to implement: just ignore anything that's between two balanced tags and output it verbatim.

• URLs and notes can have their reference at the bottom of the text. Using data structures for hyperlinks could simply record something like:

  [my text to a link][linkkey]
  results in a structure like: 
      URLStructure: 
      |  InnerText : "my text to a link"
      |  Key       : "linkkey"
      |  URL       : <null>
  

• Headers can be defined with an underline, that could force us to use a simple data structure for a generic paragraph and modify its properties as we read the file:

  ParagraphStructure:
  |  InnerText    : the current paragraph text 
  |                 (beginning of line until end of line).
  |  HeadingLevel : <null> or 1-4 when we can assess 
  |                 that paragraph heading level, if any.
  

Anyway, just some thoughts.

I'm sure that there are many small details to take care of and I'm pretty sure that Regexes could become handy during the process.
After all, they were meant to process text.

Answer 8

The only markdown implementation I know of, that uses an actual parser, is Jon MacFarleane’s peg-markdown. Its parser is based on a Parsing Expression Grammar parser generator called leg.

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EDIT: Mauricio Fernandez recently released his Simple Markup Markdown parser, which he wrote as part of his OcsiBlog Weblog Engine. Because the parser is written in OCaml, it is extremely simple and short (268 SLOC for the parser, 43 SLOC for the HTML emitter), yet blazingly fast (20% faster than discount (written in hand-optimized C) and sixhundred times faster than BlueCloth (Ruby)), despite the fact that it isn't even optimized for performance yet. Because it is only intended for internal use by Mauricio himself for his weblog, there are a few deviations from the official Markdown specification, but Mauricio has created a branch which reverts most of those changes.

Answer 9

I released a new parser-based Markdown Java implementation last week, called pegdown. pegdown uses a PEG parser to first build an abstract syntax tree, which is subsequently written out to HTML. As such it is quite clean and much easier to read, maintain and extend than a regex based approach. The PEG grammar is based on John MacFarlanes C implementation "peg-markdown".

Maybe something of interest to you...