Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter.
Pypandoc uses pandoc, so it needs an available installation of pandoc. Pypandoc provides 2 packages, "pypandoc" and "pypandoc_binary", with the second one including pandoc out of the box. The 2 packages are identical, with the only difference being that one includes pandoc, while the other don't.
If pandoc is already installed (i.e. pandoc is in the PATH), pypandoc uses the version with the
higher version number, and if both are the same, the already installed version. See Specifying the location of pandoc binaries for more.
To use pandoc filters, you must have the relevant filters installed on your machine.
If you want to install pandoc yourself or are on a unsupported platform, you'll need to install "pypandoc" and install pandoc manually
pip install pypandoc
If you want pandoc included out of the box, you can utilize our pypandoc_binary package, which are identical to the "pypandoc" package, but with pandoc included.
pip install pypandoc_binary
Prebuilt wheels for Windows and Mac OS X
If you use Linux and have your own wheelhouse,
you can build a wheel which include pandoc with
python setup_binary.py download_pandoc; python setup.py bdist_wheel. Be aware that this works only
on 64bit intel systems, as we only download it from the
official releases.
Pypandoc is included in conda-forge. The conda packages will also install the pandoc package, so pandoc is available in the installation.
Install via conda install -c conda-forge pypandoc.
You can also add the channel to your conda config via
conda config --add channels conda-forge. This makes it possible to
use conda install pypandoc directly and also lets you update via conda update pypandoc.
If you don't already have pandoc on your system, or have installed the pypandoc_binary package, which includes pandoc, you need to install pandoc by yourself.
Installing via pypandoc is possible on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux (Intel-based, 64-bit):
pip install pypandoc
from pypandoc.pandoc_download import download_pandoc
# see the documentation how to customize the installation path
# but be aware that you then need to include it in the `PATH`
download_pandoc()
The default install location is included in the search path for pandoc, so you
don't need to add it to the PATH.
By default, the latest pandoc version is installed. If you want to specify your own version, say 1.19.1, use download_pandoc(version='1.19.1') instead.
Installing manually via the system mechanism is also possible. Such installation mechanism make pandoc available on many more platforms:
sudo apt-get install pandocsudo yum install pandocsudo pacman -S pandocbrew install pandoc pandoc-citeproc Caskroom/cask/mactexcabal-install pandocpkg install hs-pandocBe aware that not all install mechanisms put pandoc in the PATH, so you either
have to change the PATH yourself or set the full PATH to pandoc in
PYPANDOC_PANDOC. See the next section for more information.
You can point to a specific pandoc version by setting the environment variable
PYPANDOC_PANDOC to the full PATH to the pandoc binary
(PYPANDOC_PANDOC=/home/x/whatever/pandoc or PYPANDOC_PANDOC=c:\pandoc\pandoc.exe).
If this environment variable is set, this is the only place where pandoc is searched for.
In certain cases, e.g. pandoc is installed but a web server with its own user cannot find the binaries, it is useful to specify the location at runtime:
import os
os.environ.setdefault('PYPANDOC_PANDOC', '/home/x/whatever/pandoc')
There are two basic ways to use pypandoc: with input files or with input strings.
import pypandoc
# With an input file: it will infer the input format from the filename
output = pypandoc.convert_file('somefile.md', 'rst')
# ...but you can overwrite the format via the `format` argument:
output = pypandoc.convert_file('somefile.txt', 'rst', format='md')
# alternatively you could just pass some string. In this case you need to
# define the input format:
output = pypandoc.convert_text('# some title', 'rst', format='md')
# output == 'some title\r\n==========\r\n\r\n'
convert_text expects this string to be unicode or utf-8 encoded bytes. convert_* will always
return a unicode string.
It's also possible to directly let pandoc write the output to a file. This is the only way to
convert to some output formats (e.g. odt, docx, epub, epub3, pdf). In that case convert_*() will
return an empty string.
import pypandoc
output = pypandoc.convert_file('somefile.md', 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
assert output == ""
It's also possible to specify multiple input files to pandoc, either as absolute paths, relative paths or file patterns.
import pypandoc
# convert all markdown files in a chapters/ subdirectory.
pypandoc.convert_file('chapters/*.md', 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
# convert all markdown files in the book1 and book2 directories.
pypandoc.convert_file(['book1/*.md', 'book2/*.md'], 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
# convert the front from another drive, and all markdown files in the chapter directory.
pypandoc.convert_file(['D:/book_front.md', 'book2/*.md'], 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
pathlib is also supported.
import pypandoc
from pathlib import Path
# single file
input = Path('somefile.md')
output = input.with_suffix('.docx')
pypandoc.convert_file(input, 'docx', outputfile=output)
# convert all markdown files in a chapters/ subdirectory.
pypandoc.convert_file(Path('chapters').glob('*.md'), 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
# convert all markdown files in the book1 and book2 directories.
pypandoc.convert_file([*Path('book1').glob('*.md'), *Path('book2').glob('*.md')], 'docx', outputfile="somefile.docx")
# pathlib globs must be unpacked if they are inside lists.
In addition to format, it is possible to pass extra_args.
That makes it possible to access various pandoc options easily.
output = pypandoc.convert_text(
'<h1>Primary Heading</h1>',
'md', format='html',
extra_args=['--atx-headers'])
# output == '# Primary Heading\r\n'
output = pypandoc.convert_text(
'# Primary Heading',
'html', format='md',
extra_args=['--base-header-level=2'])
# output == '<h2 id="primary-heading">Primary Heading</h2>\r\n'
pypandoc now supports easy addition of pandoc filters.
filters = ['pandoc-citeproc']
pdoc_args = ['--mathjax',
'--smart']
output = pypandoc.convert_file(filename,
to='html5',
format='md',
extra_args=pdoc_args,
filters=filters)
Please pass any filters in as a list and not as a string.
Please refer to pandoc -h and the
official documentation for further details.
Pandoc supports custom formatting though -V parameter. In order to use it through
pypandoc, use code such as this:
output = pypandoc.convert_file('demo.md', 'pdf', outputfile='demo.pdf',
extra_args=['-V', 'geometry:margin=1.5cm'])
Note: it's important to separate
-Vand its argument within a list like that or else it won't work. This gotcha has to do with the waysubprocess.Popenworks.
Pypandoc logs messages using the Python logging library. By default, it will send messages to the console, including any messages generated by Pandoc. If desired, this behaviour can be changed by adding handlers to the pypandoc logger before calling any functions. For example, to mute all logging add a null handler:
import logging
logging.getLogger('pypandoc').addHandler(logging.NullHandler())
As it can be useful sometimes to check what pandoc version is available at your system or which particular pandoc binary is used by pypandoc. For that, pypandoc provides the following utility functions. Example:
print(pypandoc.get_pandoc_version())
print(pypandoc.get_pandoc_path())
print(pypandoc.get_pandoc_formats())
convert_text similar to pypandoc's. Its focus is on writing and running pandoc filters though.Contributions are welcome. When opening a PR, please keep the following guidelines in mind:
flake8 pypandoc/*.py tests.pyREADME.md unless you are already there. In that case tweak your contributions.Note that for citeproc tests to pass you'll need to have pandoc-citeproc installed. If you installed a prebuilt wheel or conda package, it is already included.
setup.py fail hard if pandoc is
missing, Travis, Dockerfile, PyPI badge, Tox, PEP-8, improved documentationextra_args example to READMEconvert_* API. Former maintainer of pypandoc_get_pandoc_urls for installing arbitrary version as well as the latest version of pandoc. Minor: README, Travis, setup.py.Pypandoc is available under MIT license. See LICENSE for more details. Pandoc itself is available under the GPL2 license.
FAQs
Thin wrapper for pandoc.
We found that pypandoc-binary demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
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