rpearce/parse-md

Parse Markdown file's metadata from its content

parseMD

This library exists as a way to pass a markdown file's content and have its metadata and markdown returned as an object containing metadata and content keys.

Note that it is not trying to do anything but solve the markdown metadata vs. content parsing problem and is not parsing the markdown body, itself. You can use something like marked for that.

What It Does

For example,

---
title: This is a test
description: Once upon a time...
---
# Title of my great post
Lorem ipsum dolor...

would be parsed as

{
  metadata: {
    title: "This is a test",
    description: "Once upon a time..."
  },
  content: "# Title of my great post\nLorem ipsum dolor..."
}

Note: This tool expects that your Markdown metadata has --- boundaries, as shown above.

Usage

Installation:

npm i parse-md

Import it where you need it, and then pass it a Markdown file's content:

import fs from 'fs'
import parseMD from 'parse-md'

const fileContents = fs.readFileSync('posts/first.md', 'utf8')
const { metadata, content } = parseMD(fileContents)

console.log(metadata) // { title: 'Great first post', description: 'This is my first great post. Rawr' }
console.log(content) // "# My first post..."

Links

• Changelog
• Contributing
• Code of Conduct

Note about CommonJS

If you need to CommonJS module support, use version 2.x, and require it like this:

const parseMD = require('parse-md').default

Contributors ✨

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

Robert Pearce 💻 📖 💡 🤔 ⚠️

Justin Chan 🐛

Alex Gherghisan 💻 🐛 🤔

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

parse-md's Issues

Consider removing/replacing dependency on jsYaml

It seriously increases the package size, so let's see if we can replace this at some point...

Can't use properly inside a node ESM package

Hi,

Thanks for the great library! I'm having some trouble importing it in a project uses native node ESM.

Importing the default export seems to return an object with a default key inside of it. Here's an example:

$ cat test.mjs
import parseMD from "parse-md";
console.log(parseMD);
$ node test.mjs
{ default: [Function: parseMD] }

Directly calling parseMD (as per docs) at this point would obviously crash node because parseMD is an object, not a function.

Having looked at package.json I think it's using an older/deprecated way of specifying ESM exports. According to Node 16's docs we should use the exports key in package.json now: https://nodejs.org/api/packages.html#exports

I'm happy to contribute a fix to this if you're willing to publish a new version to npm for it 😄

Allow for data to be written in JSON also instead of only YAML

I should be allowed to write JSON in the case that I don't like YAML:

---
{
  page: {
    title: '...',
    description: '...'
  }
}

---

bump dev deps & resolve security issues

Should ParseMD support passing a filename and reading the contents?

Should reading a file be a thing, or should this be unopinionated?

If so, then how would that look?

/*
 * note that this API decision would conflict with
 * how it works currently where it just parses the string that is passed to it
 */
ParseMD('path/to/file.md')

Should it be able to accept multiple?

// array
ParseMD(['path/to/file.md', 'path/to/file2.md'])

// variadic
ParseMD('path/to/file.md', 'path/to/file2.md')

Or would passing it an object with named keys make more sense?

ParseMD({ file: 'path/to/file.md' }, { file2: 'path/to/file2.md' })

Deep thoughts...

Convert to TS

How to edit the metadata and save it back as markdown?

Hi!
Any suggestions on how to edit the metadata and save the changes back to the original markdown?

Thank you in advance!

Couple of v3.0.0 issues

From #24 (comment):

• tsc output files only have .js extension so package.json points at missing files now (e.g. dist/cjs/index.cjs doesn't exist, dist/cjs/index.js does though)
• its type information is not published. You'll need to set the types field in package.json https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/declaration-files/publishing.html#including-declarations-in-your-npm-package

TypeError: parseMD is not a function

i tried to use the example listed in the readme and i get TypeError: parseMD is not a function

const fileContents = fs.readFileSync('posts/first.md', 'utf8')
const { metadata, content } = parseMD(fileContents)

console.log(metadata); // { title: 'Great first post', description: 'This is my first great post. Rawr' }
console.log(content); // "# My first post..."

Remove dependency of marked and allow for any markdown processor to be used