illiterate.js.md

Illiterate

Extract code block from markdown à la coffeescript - but for any language.

Installation

npm install -g illiterate

Usage

Run illiterate on a markdown file and the code blocks will be extracted and output in the console.

illiterate <filename.ext.md>

For example, the build command for parsing this markdown file into the actual illiterate.js library...

illiterate src/illiterate.js.md > lib/illiterate.js

After being processed by illiterate, only the code blocks are output, which can be seen in lib/illiterate.js.

Build

The build command is set in the package.json file so you can...

npm run build

Source

This file is the main library, which compiles into lib/illiterate.js. There is also a command line tool wrapper in bin/illiterate.

Initialize environment

Create self executing enclosure - convert function into expression by prefixing ! which prevents accidental invokation of code concatenated beforehand. Might not pass JSLint with default options, but if it is good enough for twitter, it is good enough for me :)

!function(){

    var root = this,
        illiterate;

Load dependencies... but how to handle this in the browser context..!?

        var _ = require('lodash'),
        md = require('markdown-it')();

Define main parse method, which accepts a string

    illiterate = function(text) {

Create a variable to store output as it is built up from input files

        var out = [];

Main loop

We only want to extract code blocks, so remove other rules, and override code_block rule

        md.renderer.rules = {
            code_block: function (tokens, idx) {
                out.push(tokens[idx].content)
            }
        }

Run the render method, which will callback the code_block rule for each extracted block of code

        md.render(text)

Output extracted code blocks

        return out.join('');

    };

Fin

    if (typeof exports !== 'undefined') {
        if (typeof module !== 'undefined' && module.exports) {
            exports = module.exports = illiterate;
        }
    } else {
        root.illiterate = illiterate;
    }

    if (typeof define === 'function' && define.amd) {
        define('illiterate', [], function() {
            return illiterate;
        });
    }

    return illiterate;

And finally what has been opened, must be closed, and executed...

}.call(this);