metadown

Metadown

tl;dr... This gem gives you a custom markdown parser that allows you to prefix the markdown itself with YAML metadata.

Sometimes, just having plain markdown isn't good enough. Say you're writing a blog post, and you want to include some information about the post itself, such as the date and time it was posted. Keeping it in a separate file seems like a bad idea, but Markdown doesn't have any good way of doing this.

Enter Jekyll. It lets you put some YAML at the head of your file:

---
layout: post
title: An Awesome Blog Post
---

Four score and seven years ago,

Woudn't that be neat to use on other projects? I thought so too! Hence, metadown.

Furthermore, you don't have to have just markdown. Inject any kind of parser you'd like!

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'metadown'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install metadown

Usage

Metadown might have the simplest API I've ever written: one method! Just send the string with the metadown you want rendered, and boom! You get an object back with two attributes: output and metadata.

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"}

If you don't want to use Markdown, I assume you're using a Tilt template of some kind:

require 'metadown'
require 'erb'
require 'tilt'

data = Metadown.render("<h1><%= 'Hi' %></h1>", Tilt::ERBTemplate)
data.output #=> "<h1>Hi</h1>"
data.metadata #=> "{}"

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request