Re: [Python-markdown-discuss] Ideas for future development.

[Waylan L. <way...@ic...>]

Dave,

I assume you are referring to access to the parse tree from which you can
render your own output. I know a few Markdown parsers that do this. The most
notably being Pandoc which outputs to a wide variety of formats
(unfortunately, Pandoc is not a python library although someone may have
written a python library that wraps Pandoc's command line interface -- which
admittedly does not give you access to the parse tree). There are a few C
libraries out there that either have a Python wrapper or can easily be
wrapped in Python that offer access to their parse tree (sorry I forget
which ones). And most recently, [Mistune][1] was created, which is a Python
port of the JavaScript Marked library. I haven't taken a real close look at
Mistune, but **if** it is a good port of Marked then I would say that it is
exactly what I would do if Python-Markdown's existing code, user base, and
extension API didn't already exist. I just can't see maintaining the
existing API and moving to such a different way of parsing Markdown text. I
think there is plenty of room for both implementations to thrive.

That said, while Python-Markdown doesn't technically generate a parse tree -
it does create the entire document as an ElementTree, and the serializer can
be swapped out for your own - so you could write your own serializer which
output XML if you desired. Of course, you would then have to work out how to
handle the Postprocessors that run after the serializer - but it's not
impossible. See this [test][2] which demonstrates how to swap out the
serializer.

[1]: https://github.com/lepture/mistune
[2]:
https://github.com/waylan/Python-Markdown/blob/master/tests/test_apis.py#L38
6

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Pawson [mailto:dav...@gm...] 
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2014 2:09 AM
To: Waylan Limberg; PythonMD list
Subject: [Python-markdown-discuss] Ideas for future development.

Very personal one.
I've an XML background. I can do things with XML I can't with plain text.

Idea for future development.

Isolate the mapping of input markup to output syntax.
Possibly isolating block and inlines.

That would allow replacement of html with XML.
(Ideally allowing extensions to use this form)

regards

-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
Docbook FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk

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