Awk library to convert GitHub-flavored markdown to HTML or to plain text.
To use this to make a program that converts markdown to HTML, write the following Awk code:
@include "markdown.awk"
{ lines = lines $0 "\n" }
END { printf "%s", markdown::to_html(lines) }
(Requires the Gnu version of Awk, because it uses ‘@include’ and namespaces.)
More documentation is included in the markdown.awk file.
There are several programs that convert markdown (GitHub-flavored markdown or other dialects) to HTML and this one isn't the best (see limitations below). So why this code?
It's not a program, but a library. (Although it only requires three lines to make it a program, see above). And in particular it is a library for Awk. It is meant for people who need to add markdown support to an Awk program.
You could, of course, call an external program from your Awk script to convert markdown to HTML. But this library provides two extra functions that may occasionally be handy and that existing programs don't provide. (At least I haven't found any.) And that is the ability to parse inline markdown only, i.e., bold, italics, links, etc., while ignoring paragraphs, lists, etc.; and the ability to strip markdown from text to retain just the plain text content.
The former is provided by the function markdown::to_inline_html(), the latter by the function markdown::to_text().
The code does not currently implement ‘setexts headings’ (headings that are underlined instead of prefixed with one or more ‘#’ characters), ‘tight lists’ (lists where the generated HTML looks like item
Character entities, such as é and é, only expand correctly in UTF-8 locales.
The code does not currently implement extended autolinks (bare URLs, email addresses and certain domain names).
The code does not currently implement the task list extension, i.e., [x] is not transformed into a checkbox.
The tables extension is not implemented.
Link reference definitions are not supported.
The code does not fully implement the Disallowed Raw HTML extension: Tags like