gray-matter VS markdown-it

Writing in markdown is super convenient, and supported by just about any text editor. To convert these .md files to browser-ready HTML, I wrote a simple little Node.js script using two great npm packages called gray-matter and showdown.

Next, install gray-matter to extract metadata from the front matter of markdown files, and marked to convert the markdown files to HTML:

It turns out that Docusaurus uses an open source JavaScript parser called gray-matter to parse the front matter from markdown files! After installing gray-matter using npm and them importing it into the markdownUtils.ts file, all it takes is calling the matter method and passing the markdown file contents to get returned an Object with data and content (the data being the front matter and the content being the rest of the markdown file contents).

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

In this article we walk you through the process of creating a simple blog app using the popular React framework NextJS, gray-matter and next-mdx-remote.

In order to get post information (such as author, title, date, etc.) from our HTML without having them be apart of our rendered post we need a way to parse YAML front matter, this is where gray-matter comes in hand.

It’s actually not part of the CommonMark spec, so you’ll often need a 3rd party library to parse it out on top of your Markdown parser. In JavaScript we use gray-matter which converts frontmatter into a JS object we can more easily use.

Over the past few weeks, I mostly wrote on how to template a Node.js application with EJS using Express. Then, I wrote an article showing how to create a Markdown blog in Node.js using EJS, Express, gray-matter and markdown-it. Today, I'll combine those tutorials to turn the Markdown blog, from the last tutorial, into a simple SSG.

gray-matter, to parse the front matter from the Markdown files

Luckily for us, there is a fantastic NPM package that can help us with this. Let’s install it.

Parse it into HTML using markdown-it

We can easily use markdown-it, a markdown parser for rendering a mix of JavaScript and plain text into a markdown file. To get started, kindly create a new directory with the following file structure:

github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it - markdown biblioteca.

markdown-it - Markdown parser done right. Fast and easy to extend.

Maybe Markdown It? link

I have found that when you start working on just a single project, it will naturally lead to other opportunities (e.g. upstream libraries, similar projects, etc). When I started working on MarkBind, a static site generator, I was also making occasional contributions to some of the plugins for markdown-it, the Markdown parser that MarkBind uses. I was fixing bugs in MarkBind by discovering the root causes in the upstream libraries and pushing fixes there to hopefully benefit other projects as well. I even made a pull request to fix the documentation that I was reading on an MDN page for : The Table Body element, something that broke the server-side rendering of MarkBind.

Next, I setup a markdown parser, markdown-it. I then created another Mustache lambda for converting markdown to HTML and injecting it in the template output. I also ran the Markdown string through the Mustache parser, so I could use my “media” lambda inside markdown. This is where things got gross in the code.

In Eleventy, a footnote’s HTML begins like this if one is using the most typical footnotes-ready Markdown setup, i.e., the markdown-it parser combined with the markdown-it-footnote plugin:

At its core it is an extension to the popular open-source Markdown library markdown-it. Plugins for markdown parsers and preprocesseors are an avenue for more innovation of this nature.

Enhance does not natively support rendering markdown into HTML, which is out of scope for the project. Instead, we rely on markdown-it, an excellent JavaScript markdown parser that is endlessly configurable with plugins. As we use markdown in many different projects, we’ve created a node module called, Arcdown, which packages together our preferred conventions for parsing markdown files.