Convert HTML back to Markdown for editing in wmd

Question

I am curious to do what happens when you edit a post on this site.

I am using wmd for my markdown editor, of course when I goto edit, I get the HTML it generated not the markdown like on stackoverflow. Now, is there a way I can store both? or is it reliable enough to simply convert the HTML back to markdown to show in the wmd editor?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to convert HTML to Markdown in batch, I can recommend Aaron Swartz’s html2text.py Python script with which you can just:

cat my.html | python html2text.py # outputs markdown

Edit 05/11/12: Nowadays I use Pandoc which is like a swiss-knife for text documents. Can convert html<>textile<>markdown<>epub<>pdf<>latex, etc.

Answer 2

Look at the optionsExample.html in your WMD distribution. There's an option to send the result to the server as Markdown.