fenceparser

A well-tested parser for parsing metadata out of fenced code blocks in Markdown.

Overview

Assuming you have this code fence in your Markdown,

 ```ts twoslash {1-3, 5} title="Hello, World"

Using remark will yield two information about that code block, lang and meta like this.

{
  "lang": "ts",
  "meta": "twoslash {1-3, 5} title=\"Hello, World\""
}

Use fenceparser to parse the meta string out to a useful object.

import parse from 'fenceparser'

console.log(parse(meta))

// {
//   twoslash: true,
//   highlight: { '1-3': true, '5': true },
//   title: 'Hello, World'
// }

The parser won't intentionally handle parsing the language part since it is usually handled by the Markdown parsers.

But if you want to allow loose syntax grammars such as ts{1-3, 5} as well as ts {1-3, 5} which is used by gatsby-remark-vscode as an example, remark won't parse the language correctly.

{
  "lang": "ts{1-3,", // because remark uses space to split
  "meta": "5}"
}

In these cases, you can use the the library's lex function to get a properly tokenized array. You may then take out the first element as lang. For example,

import { lex, parse } from 'fenceparser'
// Notice this ^ parse is not the same the default export function

const full = [node.lang, node.meta].join(' ') // Join them back

const tokens = lex(full)
const lang = tokens.shift() // ts
const meta = parse(tokens) // { highlight: {'1-3': true, '5': true} }

Syntax

The syntax grammar is loosely based on techniques used by various syntax-highlighters. Rules are such that

• Valid HTML attributes can be used, attribute, data-attribute, etc.
• Attributes without values are assigned as true
• Attribute values can be single or double quoted strings, int/float numbers, booleans, objects or arrays
• Non-quoted strings are valid as long as they are not separated by a whitespace or a line-break, attr=--theme-color
• Objects can accept valid attributes as children, or valid attributes with value assigned by : keyword, {1-3, 5, ids: {7}}
• Arrays are just like JavaScript's arrays
• Objects without attribute keys {1-3} {7} are merged and assigned to the highlight object
• No trailing commas

Acknowledgements

1. This project is made initially to use with Twoslash.
2. The Lexer and Parser are based on the examples from the book Crafting Interpreters.

Changelog

1.1.1

• Add minimalistic as default prettier config and format code