remove-markdown

What is remove-markdown?

The remove-markdown npm package is a utility that strips Markdown formatting from text, leaving only the plain text content. This can be useful for displaying Markdown content in environments that do not support Markdown or for preprocessing text for further analysis.

What are remove-markdown's main functionalities?

Basic Markdown Removal

This feature allows you to remove basic Markdown formatting such as headers, bold, and italic text from a string.

const removeMd = require('remove-markdown');
const markdownText = '# Hello World\nThis is a **bold** statement.';
const plainText = removeMd(markdownText);
console.log(plainText); // Output: 'Hello World\nThis is a bold statement.'

Handling Links

This feature strips Markdown link syntax, leaving just the link text.

const removeMd = require('remove-markdown');
const markdownText = '[Google](https://www.google.com) is a search engine.';
const plainText = removeMd(markdownText);
console.log(plainText); // Output: 'Google is a search engine.'

Handling Images

This feature removes Markdown image syntax, leaving just the alt text.

const removeMd = require('remove-markdown');
const markdownText = '![Alt text](https://example.com/image.jpg) is an image.';
const plainText = removeMd(markdownText);
console.log(plainText); // Output: 'Alt text is an image.'

Other packages similar to remove-markdown

turndown

Turndown is a library that converts HTML into Markdown. While it primarily focuses on converting HTML to Markdown, it can also be used to strip HTML tags, which can be useful for similar purposes as remove-markdown.

marked

Marked is a fast, low-level Markdown parser that can be used to convert Markdown to HTML. While its primary function is not to strip Markdown, it can be used in conjunction with other tools to achieve similar results.

showdown

Showdown is a bidirectional Markdown to HTML converter. It can be used to convert Markdown to HTML and then strip the HTML tags to get plain text, providing a similar end result to remove-markdown.

README

What is it?

remove-markdown is a node.js module that will remove (strip) Markdown formatting from text. Markdown formatting means pretty much anything that doesn’t look like regular text, like square brackets, asterisks etc.

When do I need it?

The typical use case is to display an excerpt from some Markdown text, without any of the actual Markdown syntax - for example in a list of posts.

Installation

npm install remove-markdown

Usage

const removeMd = require('remove-markdown');
const markdown = '# This is a heading\n\nThis is a paragraph with [a link](http://www.disney.com/) in it.';
const plainText = removeMd(markdown); // plainText is now 'This is a heading\n\nThis is a paragraph with a link in it.'

You can also supply an options object to the function. Currently, the following options are supported:

const plainText = removeMd(markdown, {
  stripListLeaders: true , // strip list leaders (default: true)
  listUnicodeChar: '',     // char to insert instead of stripped list leaders (default: '')
  gfm: true                // support GitHub-Flavored Markdown (default: true)
  useImgAltText: true      // replace images with alt-text, if present (default: true)
});

Setting stripListLeaders to false will retain any list characters (*, -, +, (digit).).

TODO

PRs are very much welcome. Here are some ideas for future enhancements:

• Allow the RegEx expressions to be customized per rule
• Make the rules more robust, support more edge cases
• Add more (comprehensive) tests

Credits

The code is based on Markdown Service Tools - Strip Markdown by Brett Terpstra.

Authors

Stian Grytøyr (original creator) zuchka (maintainer since 2023)