gray-matter VS react-hook-form

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.

To do this, we use the matter npm package.

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

React Hook Form is one of the most popular libraries for building forms in React apps with over 39k stars on GitHub. The library has no external dependencies according to Bundle Phobia.

Link: https://react-hook-form.com/

The idea here is to first define an array of field names for each provider. We'll also need a map with more detailed information about each field. This map will contain the field name, label, type, and validation options. We'll use this map to render the form fields and also to validate the form. Finally, we'll have a Form component that will render the form fields based on their type and handle the form submission. We'll use React Hook Form to handle the form state and validation.

Now we need to install React Hook Form because that is the package we are going to use for building our form. We also need to install the package for SendGrid. cd into the sendgrid-contact-form folder and then run this command to install the packages:

Imagine someone unknowingly unleashing heavy computation on a component without useMemo. That computation will run on every component re-render. Not only that, The dependency array in your hooks (useEffect, useMemo, useCallback) are also checked in each re-render. It's like a double whammy for performance pitfalls! I know that you can avoid this by some technique like what react-hook-form done, but remember thats an extra complexity.

But now, all those difficulties are gone since I found React Hook Form and zod.

This will greatly simplify the handling of AJAX forms in React - like for instance for a search form. But again, this may not be enough to get rid of third-party libraries like React Hook Form, which does much more than just handle form submission (validation, side effects, etc).

We could consider to do all these steps specifically for each data-set; of course this isn't an efficient approach due to the amount of repeated code involved. So what if we could abstract all this in a single management? A way to do this could be using a simple configuration in which we specify each aspect for each input (its type, validations required and so on). And we can do this thanks to the extreme flexibility provided by React Hook Form.