Today, I was working on MarkdownPanda, a bi-directiona HTML/Markdown conversion library that will be very important to Vibrato Notes.
With MarkdownPanda, I have gone through quite the number of Markdown parsers. I started my decision with Sundown and Discount. Then decided to go with Hoedown. I was happy with Hoedown up until the point where I noticed super strange behavior in my unit tests where previous markdown->HTML operations would concatenate onto new ones…Super weird and just made me want to find something new. Came across CMark and found it absolutely perfect..Until I realized tables and strikethroughs were not implemented. And then I found Github’s own CMark-GFM.
At a surface level, the library is super simple and hardly any different than CMark.
Example Program
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <cmark-gfm.h>
int main()
{
char *markdown = "# Welcome";
char *html = cmark_markdown_to_html(markdown, strlen(markdown), CMARK_OPT_DEFAULT);
printf("%s", html);
free(html);
return 0;
}
Easy, right? Must be smooth sailing from here! Well..we do have a bit of a problem. Tables and strikethroughs are not supported by default. There are also other extensions you may find useful.
Using extensions
In order to use extensions you must first make sure to link against libcmark-gfm-extensions. It is an additional library that is created while building CMark-GFM.
Here is an example program that uses markdown extensions:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <cmark-gfm.h>
#include <cmark-gfm-core-extensions.h>
// This is a function that will make enabling extensions easier later on.
void addMarkdownExtension(cmark_parser *parser, char *extName) {
cmark_syntax_extension *ext = cmark_find_syntax_extension(extName);
if ( ext )
cmark_parser_attach_syntax_extension(parser, ext);
}
// A function to convert HTML to markdown
char *to_html(char *markdown_string)
{
int options = CMARK_OPT_DEFAULT; // You can also use CMARK_OPT_STRIKETHROUGH_DOUBLE_TILDE to enforce double tilde.
cmark_gfm_core_extensions_ensure_registered();
// Modified version of cmark_parse_document in blocks.c
cmark_parser *parser = cmark_parser_new(options);
///////////////////////
/// Add extensions here
///////////////////////
addMarkdownExtension(parser, "strikethrough");
addMarkdownExtension(parser, "table");
cmark_node *doc;
cmark_parser_feed(parser, markdown_string, strlen(markdown_string));
doc = cmark_parser_finish(parser);
cmark_parser_free(parser);
// Render
char *html = cmark_render_html(doc, options, NULL);
cmark_node_free(doc);
return html
}
// MAIN FUNCTION
int main()
{
char *markdown = "# Welcome";
char *html = to_html(markdown);
printf("%s", html);
free(html);
return 0;
}
Hope this saved you some time! You can check out how we implemented this in MarkdownPanda by viewing markdownpanda_md2html.c.
If you enjoyed, feel free to browse our open-source software.