comrak

Rust port of github's cmark-gfm.

• Installation
• Usage
• Security
• Extensions
• Related projects
• Contributing
• Legal

Installation

Specify it as a requirement in Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
comrak = "0.7"

Comrak supports Rust stable.

Usage

A binary is included which does everything you typically want:

$ comrak --help
comrak 0.7.0
Ashe Connor <ashe@kivikakk.ee>
A 100% CommonMark-compatible GitHub Flavored Markdown parser and formatter

USAGE:
    comrak [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [--] [FILE]...

FLAGS:
        --gfm                Enable GitHub-flavored markdown extensions strikethrough, tagfilter, table, autolink, and
                             tasklist. It also enables --github-pre-lang.
        --github-pre-lang    Use GitHub-style <pre lang> for code blocks
        --hardbreaks         Treat newlines as hard line breaks
    -h, --help               Prints help information
        --smart              Use smart punctuation
        --unsafe             Allow raw HTML and dangerous URLs
    -V, --version            Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --default-info-string <INFO>    Default value for fenced code block's info strings if none is given
    -e, --extension <EXTENSION>...      Specify an extension name to use [possible values: strikethrough, tagfilter,
                                        table, autolink, tasklist, superscript, footnotes, description-lists]
    -t, --to <FORMAT>                   Specify output format [default: html]  [possible values: html, commonmark]
        --header-ids <PREFIX>           Use the Comrak header IDs extension, with the given ID prefix
        --width <WIDTH>                 Specify wrap width (0 = nowrap) [default: 0]

ARGS:
    <FILE>...    The CommonMark file to parse; or standard input if none passed

And there's a Rust interface. You can use comrak::markdown_to_html directly:

use comrak::{markdown_to_html, ComrakOptions};
assert_eq!(markdown_to_html("Hello, **世界**!", &ComrakOptions::default()),
           "<p>Hello, <strong>世界</strong>!</p>\n");

Or you can parse the input into an AST yourself, manipulate it, and then use your desired formatter:

extern crate comrak;
use comrak::{parse_document, format_html, Arena, ComrakOptions};
use comrak::nodes::{AstNode, NodeValue};

// The returned nodes are created in the supplied Arena, and are bound by its lifetime.
let arena = Arena::new();

let root = parse_document(
    &arena,
    "This is my input.\n\n1. Also my input.\n2. Certainly my input.\n",
    &ComrakOptions::default());

fn iter_nodes<'a, F>(node: &'a AstNode<'a>, f: &F)
    where F : Fn(&'a AstNode<'a>) {
    f(node);
    for c in node.children() {
        iter_nodes(c, f);
    }
}

iter_nodes(root, &, node, {
    match &mut node.data.borrow_mut().value {
        &mut NodeValue::Text(ref mut text) => {
            let orig = std::mem::replace(text, vec![]);
            *text = String::from_utf8(orig).unwrap().replace("my", "your").as_bytes().to_vec();
        }
        _ => (),
    }
});

let mut html = vec![];
format_html(root, &ComrakOptions::default(), &mut html).unwrap();

assert_eq!(
    String::from_utf8(html).unwrap(),
    "<p>This is your input.</p>\n\
     <ol>\n\
     <li>Also your input.</li>\n\
     <li>Certainly your input.</li>\n\
     </ol>\n");

Security

As with cmark and cmark-gfm,
Comrak will scrub raw HTML and potentially dangerous links. This change was introduced in Comrak 0.4.0 in support of a
safe-by-default posture.

To allow these, use the unsafe_ option (or --unsafe with the command line program). If doing so, we recommend the
use of a sanitisation library like ammonia configured specific to your needs.

Extensions

Comrak supports the five extensions to CommonMark defined in the GitHub Flavored Markdown
Spec:

• Tables
• Task list items
• Strikethrough
• Autolinks
• Disallowed Raw HTML

Comrak additionally supports its own extensions, which are yet to be specced out (PRs welcome!):

• Superscript
• Header IDs
• Footnotes
• Description lists

By default none are enabled; they are individually enabled with each parse by setting the appropriate values in the
ComrakOptions struct.

Related projects

Comrak's design goal is to model the upstream cmark-gfm as closely as possible
in terms of code structure. The upside of this is that a change in cmark-gfm has a very predictable change in Comrak.
Likewise, any bug in cmark-gfm is likely to be reproduced in Comrak. This could be considered a pro or a con,
depending on your use case.

The downside, of course, is that the code is not what I'd call idiomatic Rust (so many RefCells), and while
contributors and I have made it as fast as possible, it simply won't be as fast as some other CommonMark parsers
depending on your use-case. Here are some other projects to consider:

• Raph Levien's pulldown-cmark. It's
  very fast, uses a novel parsing algorithm, and doesn't construct an AST (but you can use it to make one if you
  want). Recent cargo doc uses this, as do many other projects in the ecosystem. It's not quite at 100% spec
  compatibility yet.
• Ben Navetta's rcmark is a set of bindings to
  libcmark. It hasn't been updated in a while, though there's an open pull
  request.
• Know of another library? Please open a PR to add it!

As far as I know, Comrak is the only library to implement all of the GitHub Flavored Markdown
extensions to the spec, but this tends to only be important if you want to reproduce
GitHub's Markdown rendering exactly, e.g. in a GitHub client app.

Contributing

Contributions are highly encouraged; where possible I practice Optimistic Merging as
described by Peter Hintjens. Please keep the code of conduct in mind when interacting with this
project.

Thank you to comrak's many contributors for PRs and issues opened!

Legal

Copyright (c) 2017–2019, Ashe Connor. Licensed under the 2-Clause BSD
License.

cmark itself is is copyright (c) 2014, John MacFarlane.

See COPYING for all the details.