CommonMarker

Ruby wrapper for libcmark-gfm, GitHub's fork of the reference parser for CommonMark. It passes all of the C tests, and is therefore spec-complete. It also includes extensions to the CommonMark spec as documented in the GitHub Flavored Markdown spec, such as support for tables, strikethroughs, and autolinking.

For more information on available extensions, see the documentation below.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'commonmarker'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install commonmarker

Usage

Converting to HTML

Call render_html on a string to convert it to HTML:

require 'commonmarker'
CommonMarker.render_html('Hi *there*', :DEFAULT)
# <p>Hi <em>there</em></p>\n

The second argument is optional--see below for more information.

Generating a document

You can also parse a string to receive a Document node. You can then print that node to HTML, iterate over the children, and other fun node stuff. For example:

require 'commonmarker'

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc('*Hello* world', :DEFAULT)
puts(doc.to_html) # <p>Hi <em>there</em></p>\n

doc.walk do |node|
  puts node.type # [:document, :paragraph, :text, :emph, :text]
end

The second argument is optional--see below for more information.

Example: walking the AST

You can use walk or each to iterate over nodes:

• walk will iterate on a node and recursively iterate on a node's children.
• each will iterate on a node and its children, but no further.

require 'commonmarker'

# parse the files specified on the command line
doc = CommonMarker.render_doc("# The site\n\n [GitHub](https://www.github.com)")

# Walk tree and print out URLs for links
doc.walk do |node|
  if node.type == :link
    printf("URL = %s\n", node.url)
  end
end

# Capitalize all regular text in headers
doc.walk do |node|
  if node.type == :header
    node.each do |subnode|
      if subnode.type == :text
        subnode.string_content = subnode.string_content.upcase
      end
    end
  end
end

# Transform links to regular text
doc.walk do |node|
  if node.type == :link
    node.insert_before(node.first_child)
    node.delete
  end
end

Creating a custom renderer

You can also derive a class from CommonMarker's HtmlRenderer class. This produces slower output, but is far more customizable. For example:

class MyHtmlRenderer < CommonMarker::HtmlRenderer
  def initialize
    super
    @headerid = 1
  end

  def header(node)
    block do
      out("<h", node.header_level, " id=\"", @headerid, "\">",
               :children, "</h", node.header_level, ">")
      @headerid += 1
    end
  end
end

myrenderer = MyHtmlRenderer.new
puts myrenderer.render(doc)

# Print any warnings to STDERR
renderer.warnings.each do |w|
  STDERR.write("#{w}\n")
end

Options

CommonMarker accepts the same options that CMark does, as symbols. Note that there is a distinction in CMark for "parse" options and "render" options, which are represented in the tables below.

Parse options

Render options

Passing options

To apply a single option, pass it in as a symbol argument:

CommonMarker.render_doc("\"Hello,\" said the spider.", :SMART)
# <p>“Hello,” said the spider.</p>\n

To have multiple options applied, pass in an array of symbols:

CommonMarker.render_html("\"'Shelob' is my name.\"", [:HARDBREAKS, :SOURCEPOS])

For more information on these options, see the CMark documentation.

Extensions

Both render_html and render_doc take an optional third argument defining the extensions you want enabled as your CommonMark document is being processed. The documentation for these extensions are defined in this spec, and the rationale is provided in this blog post.

The available extensions are:

• :table - This provides support for tables.
• :tasklist - This provides support for task list items.
• :strikethrough - This provides support for strikethroughs.
• :autolink - This provides support for automatically converting URLs to anchor tags.
• :tagfilter - This escapes several "unsafe" HTML tags, causing them to not have any effect.

Developing locally

After cloning the repo:

script/bootstrap
bundle exec rake compile

If there were no errors, you're done! Otherwise, make sure to follow the CMark dependency instructions.

Benchmarks

Some rough benchmarks:

$ bundle exec rake benchmark

input size = 11063727 bytes

redcarpet
  0.070000   0.020000   0.090000 (  0.079641)
github-markdown
  0.070000   0.010000   0.080000 (  0.083535)
commonmarker with to_html
  0.100000   0.010000   0.110000 (  0.111947)
commonmarker with ruby HtmlRenderer
  1.830000   0.030000   1.860000 (  1.866203)
kramdown
  4.610000   0.070000   4.680000 (  4.678398)