unified VS zod

From TFA:

> My idea was that surely it's possible to write a bunch of markdown, and then have that get wrapped in a bunch of JSX tags that come pre-styled, using the styles of your existing repo? For example, what I expected was to be able to write *test* (Markdown for bold) and then get a component that looked liketest where is a library-defined React component

It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some links if others are wondering the same thing.

If you like to roll your own solution for that, you can use the unified ecosystem: https://unifiedjs.com/

However, if you want JSX just do what everyone does and reach for MDX:

Styling the blog, figure out the eco-system within UnifiedJs, remark-rehype, oh boy, I could write another blog with that.

To build the Markdown editor (and the preview, mostly), I decided to use unified, an ecosystem of tools allowing the developer to parse a format into an abstract tree and back into another format (for example, markdown to html) and modify said tree (for example, to add specific classes to certain html elements before they are converted to an actual html string. The basics of how to do so can be found in this article, but they mostly consist of:

It’ll take you a few hours to become proficient in the “unified” syntax tree libraries. So worth it. Easy fully customized conversion to/from html, react, plain text, markdown, you name it. https://unifiedjs.com/

Why universal? Because a lot of languages are simillar in a bunch of ways and it might be good to reuse existing parts of the compiler to speed up the process of writing new DSLs for example. Also a pretty big use-case is not for compilers itself but just for transformers like Markdown to HTML, there are already a lot of libraries (like https://github.com/unifiedjs/unified for ASTs and https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ for parsing) that try achieve similar goals but they are not working together.

Unified is a framework to process Markdown. It's a plugin-based tool that allows you to inspect and modify the way Markdown is converted to other formats like HTML.

under the hood, the markdown is parsed by the unified remark and rehype processors, which in turn under the hood manipulate the markdown + HTML as an AST, which gives a lot of flexibility on parsing and rendering markdown. The editor uses them as plugins, which allows me to pick the features and inject them into the editor, one such injectable feature is the custom-made "copy from anywhere & paste as markdown" feature.

Having the flexibility to create custom React Components for markdown is essential and with react-markdown, we can achieve this in just a few lines of code. Boosting performance, increasing link security, and having overall increased capabilities for our markdown data are what we achieve here. Aside from the improvements within our application, this component is super easy to use and taps us into the unifiedjs (giving us superpowers!).

The Markdown processor used unified assets.

[Zod Documentation](https://zod.dev/) [Zod Error Handling](https://zod.dev/ERROR_HANDLING?id=error-handling-in-zod) [React-Hook-Form Documentation](https://react-hook-form.com/get-started) [Hookform Resolvers](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hookform/resolvers)

This is a very fair comment, and you seem open to understanding why types are useful.

"problems that are due to typing" is a very difficult thing to unpack because types can mean _so_ many things.

Static types are absolutely useless (and, really, a net negative) if you're not using them well.

Types don't help if you don't spend the time modeling with the type system. You can use the type system to your advantage to prevent invalid states from being represented _at all_.

As an example, consider a music player that keeps track of the current song and the current position in the song.

If you model this naively you might do something like: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/d0f57c99bfd69cf9eada4...

In the example above you _are_ using types. It might not be obvious that some of these issues can be solved with stronger types, that is, you might say that "You rarely see problems that are due to typing".

Here's an example where the type system can give you a lot more safety: https://gist.github.com/shepherdjerred/0976bc9d86f0a19a75757...

You'll notice that this kind of safety is pretty limited. If you're going to write a music app, you'll probably need API calls, local storage, URL routes, etc.

TypeScript's typechecking ends at the "boundaries" of the type system, e.g. it cannot automatically typecheck your fetch or localStorage calls return the correct types. If you're casting, you're bypassing the type systems and making it worthless. Runtime type checking libraries like Zod [0] can take care of this for you and are able to typecheck at the boundaries of your app so that the type system can work _extremely_ well.

[0]: https://zod.dev/ note: I mentioned Zod because I like it. There are _many_ similar libraries.

Zod is an open-source schema declaration and validation library that emphasizes TypeScript. It can refer to any data type, from simple to complex. Zod eliminates duplicative type declarations by inferring static TypeScript types and allows easy composition of complex data structures from simpler ones. It has no dependencies, is compatible with Node.js and modern browsers, and has a concise, chainable interface. Zod is lightweight (8kb when zipped), immutable, with methods returning new instances. It encourages parsing over validation and is not limited to TypeScript but works well with JavaScript as well.

Zod is a TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library. It helps create schemas for any data type and is very developer-friendly. Zod has the functional approach of "parse, don't validate." It supports coercion in all primitive types.

Link: https://zod.dev/

You can check out their documentation here.

You can learn more about Zod on their website here.

In JS, it's a good idea anyway to use some JSON parsing library instead of JSON.parse.

With Zod, you can use z.bigint() parser. If you take the "parse any JSON" snippet https://zod.dev/?id=json-type and change z.number() to z.bigint(), it should do what you are looking for.

We will validate our input using client-side zod. Zod handles TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference. This means that it will not only validate your fields, it will also set types on validated fields.