Markdown to HTML conversion

Question

I'm still in the middle of coding my final year project at university, and I have come across an issue where I need to either convert from HTML to Markdown or visa versa. Now I have no experience whatsoever of Perl, Python, etc. so I'm in need of an easy-to-implement solution, I only have about 6 weeks left to complete this now. I'm writing the data from a WMD text box to SQL Server, and I can either upload it as Markdown or HTML but if that data needs editing it cannot be in HTML as this would be too confusing for the end user who is perceived to have zero/very little computing "know how".

What should I do?

Answer 1

Karmastan's answer is probably the best here. Keeping the raw Markdown in the database is a really good solution as it allows users to upkeep the content in a form with which they're familiar.

However, if you have a bunch of HTML which is already converted, you might want to look at something like Markdownify: The HTML to Markdown converter for PHP.

Edit: based on what you've said below, there are a few things you should keep in mind:

1. Make sure that the following is set in wmd.js:

   wmd_options = {"output": "Markdown"};

   This ensures that you're storing Markdown in the database.

   Source: How do you store the markdown using WMD in ASP.NET?

2. When outputting the Markdown to the web, you need to transform it to HTML. To do this, you'll need a library which does Markdown -> HTML conversion. Here are two examples:

   • Announcing Markdown.NET
   • Revisied Markdown.NET Library

I'm not a .NET developer, so I can't really help with how these libraries should be used, but hopefully the documentation will make that clear.

Answer 2

If you look at the web site for Markdown, you'll find a Perl script that converts Markdown-syntax documents to HTML. Keep Markdown text in your database and invoke the script whenever you need to display the text. No Perl knowledge required!