Jan 23 2012

Because I don’t have enough gems made already, I made another one last night: metadown.

What’s Metadown do?

This blog originally used Jekyll. When I moved it to my own personal blog implementation, I noticed something: Markdown doesn’t actually have support for adding YAML at the top of your files, like Jekyll does. I always knew this, I just didn’t think about it before. And I love using Markdown, so I ended up extracting my own version of this trick into Metadown.

Basically, sometimes you need metadata about your markup file. YAML is a nice format for writing key/value pairs, lists, and other things… so I’ve let you smash the two of them together in one file by adding some ---s at the top.

Gimme an Example

require 'metadown'

data = Metadown.render("hello world")
data.output #=> "<p>hello, world</p>"
data.metadata #=> "{}"

text = <<-MARKDOWN
---
key: "value"
---
hello world
MARKDOWN

data = Metadown.render(text)
data.output #=> "<p>hello, world</p>\n"
data.metadata #=> {"key" => "value"}

Where’s the code?

It’s implemented using a custom parser for Redcarpet, has a test suite, and works on every Ruby that’s not JRuby. You can check out the source here. Issues and Pull Requests welcome. There’s at least one thing that I know I’ll need to add to it in the near future.