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

Name	Description
:DEFAULT	The default parsing system.
:SOURCEPOS	Include source position in nodes
:UNSAFE	Allow raw/custom HTML and unsafe links.
:VALIDATE_UTF8	Replace illegal sequences with the replacement character U+FFFD.
:SMART	Use smart punctuation (curly quotes, etc.).
:LIBERAL_HTML_TAG	Support liberal parsing of inline HTML tags.
:FOOTNOTES	Parse footnotes.
:STRIKETHROUGH_DOUBLE_TILDE	Parse strikethroughs by double tildes (compatibility with redcarpet)

Render options

Name	Description
:DEFAULT	The default rendering system.
:SOURCEPOS	Include source position in rendered HTML.
:HARDBREAKS	Treat \n as hardbreaks (by adding <br/>).
:UNSAFE	Allow raw/custom HTML and unsafe links.
:NOBREAKS	Translate \n in the source to a single whitespace.
:VALIDATE_UTF8	Replace illegal sequences with the replacement character U+FFFD.
:SMART	Use smart punctuation (curly quotes, etc.).
:GITHUB_PRE_LANG	Use GitHub-style <pre lang> for fenced code blocks.
:LIBERAL_HTML_TAG	Support liberal parsing of inline HTML tags.
:FOOTNOTES	Render footnotes.
:STRIKETHROUGH_DOUBLE_TILDE	Parse strikethroughs by double tildes (compatibility with redcarpet)
:TABLE_PREFER_STYLE_ATTRIBUTES	Use style insted of align for table cells.
:FULL_INFO_STRING	Include full info strings of code blocks in separate attribute.

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.

Output formats

Like CMark, CommonMarker can generate output in several formats: HTML, XML, plaintext, and commonmark are currently supported.

HTML

The default output format, HTML, will be generated when calling to_html or using --to=html on the command line.

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc('*Hello* world!', :DEFAULT)
puts(doc.to_html)

<p><em>Hello</em> world!</p>

XML

XML will be generated when calling to_xml or using --to=xml on the command line.

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc('*Hello* world!', :DEFAULT)
puts(doc.to_xml)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE document SYSTEM "CommonMark.dtd">
<document xmlns="http://commonmark.org/xml/1.0">
  <paragraph>
    <emph>
      <text xml:space="preserve">Hello</text>
    </emph>
    <text xml:space="preserve"> world!</text>
  </paragraph>
</document>

Plaintext

Plaintext will be generated when calling to_plaintext or using --to=plaintext on the command line.

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc('*Hello* world!', :DEFAULT)
puts(doc.to_plaintext)

Hello world!

Commonmark

Commonmark will be generated when calling to_commonmark or using --to=commonmark on the command line.

text = <<-TEXT
1. I am a numeric list.
2. I continue the list.
* Suddenly, an unordered list!
* What fun!
TEXT

doc = CommonMarker.render_doc(text, :DEFAULT)
puts(doc.to_commonmark)

1.  I am a numeric list.
2.  I continue the list.

<!-- end list -->

  - Suddenly, an unordered list\!
  - What fun\!

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)