Python : How to convert markdown formatted text to text

Question

I need to convert markdown text to plain text format to display summary in my website. I want the code in python.

Answer 1

The Markdown and BeautifulSoup (now called beautifulsoup4) modules will help do what you describe.

Once you have converted the markdown to HTML, you can use a HTML parser to strip out the plain text.

Your code might look something like this:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from markdown import markdown  html = markdown(some_html_string) text = ''.join(BeautifulSoup(html).findAll(text=True)) 

Answer 2

Despite the fact that this is a very old question, I'd like to suggest a solution I came up with recently. This one neither uses BeautifulSoup nor has an overhead of converting to html and back.

The markdown module core class Markdown has a property output_formats which is not configurable but otherwise patchable like almost anything in python is. This property is a dict mapping output format name to a rendering function. By default it has two output formats, 'html' and 'xhtml' correspondingly. With a little help it may have a plaintext rendering function which is easy to write:

from markdown import Markdown from io import StringIO   def unmark_element(element, stream=None):     if stream is None:         stream = StringIO()     if element.text:         stream.write(element.text)     for sub in element:         unmark_element(sub, stream)     if element.tail:         stream.write(element.tail)     return stream.getvalue()   # patching Markdown Markdown.output_formats["plain"] = unmark_element __md = Markdown(output_format="plain") __md.stripTopLevelTags = False   def unmark(text):     return __md.convert(text) 

unmark function takes markdown text as an input and returns all the markdown characters stripped out.