Mapdown

A lightweight markup format to turn strings into maps.

Why? Well, sometimes you want metadata with your markup format of choice. Let's say you're writing some markdown articles, and want to add information about the author and date.

• Do you write .edn files, putting your markdown inside multiline strings with the escape nightmares that entails?

• Or do you put the metadata in another file to write markdown in its natural environment?

With Mapdown you add the metadata alongside your content, while avoiding string escaping and regaining editor support.

Install

Add [mapdown "0.2.1"] to :dependencies in your project.clj.

Usage

Given this file, say in intro.md:

:title Mapdown example
:author Magnar Sveen
:body

Here's an example of how mapdown works.

It's, like, text with keywords.

:aside

There's not much to it, really.

Turn it into a map like this:

(ns example.core
  (:require [mapdown.core :as mapdown]))

(mapdown/parse (slurp "intro.md"))

;; =>
{:title "Mapdown example"
 :author "Magnar Sveen"
 :body "Here's an example of how mapdown works.\n\nIt's, like, text with keywords."
 :aside "There's not much to it, really."}

A list of maps

If the text starts with exactly 80 dashes, mapdown will interpret it as a list of maps. Like so:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:title First item
:body

Some text
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
:title Second item
:body

More text
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

turns into:

[{:title "First item", :body "Some text"}
 {:title "Second item", :body "More text"}]

Supplementary features

You can also parse the contents of a file with (parse-file path). The only reason to use this over just slurping it yourself, is to get error messages that include the file path.

There's also (slurp-directory path regexp), which slurps in an entire directory tree of files matching the regexp, parsing everything.

(def articles (slurp-directory "resources/articles/" #"\.md$"))

This works just like the same function in Stasis, except it also parses the files. Again, this is to get better error messages.

Contribute

Yes, please do. And add tests for your feature or fix, or I'll certainly break it later.

Running the tests

lein midje will run all tests.

lein midje namespace.* will run only tests beginning with "namespace.".

lein midje :autotest will run all the tests indefinitely. It sets up a watcher on the code files. If they change, only the relevant tests will be run again.

License

Copyright © 2013-2014 Magnar Sveen

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.