Convert MediaWiki wikitext format to HTML using command line

Question

I tend to write a good amount of documentation so the MediaWiki format to me is easy for me to understand plus it saves me a lot of time than having to write traditional HTML. I, however, also write a blog and find that switching from keyboard to mouse all the time to input the correct tags for HTML adds a lot of time. I'd like to be able to write my articles in Mediawiki syntax and then convert it to HTML for use on my blog.

I've tried Google-ing but must need better nomenclature as surprisingly I haven't been able to find anything.

I use Linux and would prefer to do this from the command line.

Any one have any thoughts or ideas?

Answer 1

The best would be to use MediaWiki parser. The good news is that MediaWiki 1.19 will provide a command line tool just for that!

Disclaimer: I wrote that tool.

The script is maintenance/parse.php some usage examples straight from the source code:

Entering text yourself, ending it with Control + D:

$ php maintenance/parse.php --title foo
''[[foo]]''^D
<p><i><strong class="selflink">foo</strong></i>
</p>
$

The usual file input method:

$ echo "'''bold'''" > /tmp/foo.txt
$ php maintenance/parse.php /tmp/foo.txt
<p><b>bold</b>
</p>$

And of course piping to stdin:

$ cat /tmp/foo | php maintenance/parse.php
<p><b>bold</b>
</p>$

as of today you can get the script from http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/maintenance/parse.php and place it in your maintenance directory. It should work with MediaWiki 1.18

The script will be made available with MediaWiki 1.19.0.

Answer 2

Looked into this a bit and think that a good route to take here would be to learn to a general markup language like restucturedtext or markdown and then be able to convert from there. Discovered a program called pandoc that can convert either of these to HTML and Mediawiki. Appreciate the help.

Example:

pandoc -f mediawiki -s myfile.mediawiki  -o myfile.html -s

Answer 3

This page lists tons of MediaWiki parsers that you could try.