How to save/get metadata?

[IonicaBizau]

I'm looking how to save/read metadata like below:

---
Title:   My awesome markdown file
Author:  Me
Scripts:
    - js/doStuff.js
    - js/doMoreStuff.js
...

##Header
Regular text and stuff goes here.

[timaschew]

This is not part of a markdown parser usually.
You need a parse step before you run your markdown parser.
Here is module to fetch these data and split them into properties and the markdown body

https://github.com/jxson/front-matter

[tivie]

the bit at the top is YAML so you need a yaml parser

[IonicaBizau]

@timaschew @tivie Thanks! I built mdify which uses js-yaml to parse the YAML stuff and showdown to htmlify the markdown code. 😁

[tivie]

I've decided that a simple metadata parser would be useful in markdown documents.

The syntax is:

1. --- or ««« at the beginning of the markdown document
2. optionally followed by a alphanumeric designation of the format (anything you like as long as it does not have any white spaces or newlines and stuff)
3. followed by a newline
4. followed by key value pairs separated by a colon and a space : and a newline at the end
5. Closed by --- or »»» and a newline

like this:

---
title: document title
some meta name: some meta content
---
# my markdown document

rest of the document

or

«««
title: document title
some meta name: some meta content
»»»
# my markdown document

rest of the document

or even this:

---FORMAT-IDENTIFIER
title: document title
some meta name:
 - a list
 - of values
---
# my markdown document

rest of the document

To enable metadata parsing, one must enable the option metadata.

var conv = new showdown.Converter({metadata: true});

Showdown will expose a method for retrieving the document's metadata after parsing:

var conv = new showdown.Converter({metadata: true});
var html = conv.makeHtml(someMd);
var metadata = conv.getMetadata(); // returns an object with the document metadata

Note that showdown won't support YAML (or any other data format) out of the box, but you can retrieve the raw metadata and parse it yourself.

var conv = new showdown.Converter({metadata: true});
var html = conv.makeHtml(someMd);
var metadata = conv.getMetadata(true); // returns a string with the raw metadata
var metadataFormat = conv.getMetadataFormat(); // returns the format of the metadata

// do stuff with the metadata var

[tivie]

This feature should be implemented now

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