How would you go about parsing Markdown? [closed]

Answer 1

Here you can find a JavaScript-implementation of Markdown. It also relies heavily on regular expressions, 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 2

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...

Answer 3

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 4

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 peg.

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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.