Argot 0.6

argot text markup -- a markdown dialect

Argot is a small set of extensions on the markdown markup language designed primarily for writing technical blog entries. The extensions are not “proper” markdown extensions; they are implemented as preprocessors that compile down into markdown or html syntax. In addition to markdown’s regular syntax, which argot does not interfere with, argot provides these features:

• moin-style highlighted code blocks

• blockquote blocks

• link target processors

You can install argot with pip:

pip install argot

You can fork argot from its hg repository:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/jmoiron/argot/

requirements

argot requires markdown and pygments. The optional amazon link processor, disabled by default, requires lxml.

version 0.6 notes

Version 0.6 of argot adds some functionality to the argot script, allowing you to easily create full HTML documents (with pygments styling) from argot markup in one easy command.

Version 0.6 of argot is backwards compatible with version 0.5, but maintains the blockquote blocks which makes it incompatible with versions previous to 0.5. If you are using a version older than 0.5 and wish to upgrade, please consult the README.rst file in 0.5 for a full list of incompatabilities.

moin-style highlighted code blocks

In markdown, code blocks are blocks of text one level of indentation removed from the body text. However, when dealing with more primative browser input mechanisms, indenting lots of text can be problematic (as tab often shifts input focus). In addition to allowing for this convention, argot implements moin/tracwiki style code blocks that feature syntax highlighting via pygments.

syntax

The general syntax is ‘{{{’ followed by an optional shebang and desired pygments parser, followed by your code block, and bookended with ‘}}}’:

{{{#!parser
    ... code ...
}}}

By default, if no parser is provided, argot uses pygments to try and guess what language is being used. It falls back to the plain text lexer. If you want to force the text lexer, use a lexer of text.

blockquote blocks

Like the moin-style highlighted code blocks, blockquote blocks are primarily intended for easy cut/paste insertion of quoted blocks into a body.

syntax

The syntax for blockquote blocks is similar to that of the code blocks, except that parens are used instead of braces:

((("citation url"
quoted text
)))

The quoted text is converted to HTML via regular markdown syntax rules. Nesting blockquote blocks is not supported. The optional citation url can be surrounded in single quotes (') or double quotes (").

link target processors

Markdown links are in the style of [link text](url), but this will often interrupt writing with digging around for urls that might be complex or even unknown. Rather than linking to urls, argot allows you to encode the target information in customizable ways.

syntax

Link processors are made up of the processor tag, followed by a colon, followed by a query for that processor. For example:

[Quick reStructured Text](google: restructured text quick ref)

This calls the link processor google with the query restructured text quick ref. By default, only the link processor google is enabled. There is an amazon link processor that can be enabled, but it is suggested that for stable queries you append ‘amazon’ to google queries.

setting a google referer

Google’s ajax search API (which the link processor uses) requires that you set a referer url. If you set a google referer, Argot will fetch the first link and use that url directly:

from argot import set_google_referer
set_google_referer('http://example.com')

By default, the google link processor will return a url to an “I’m feeling lucky” google search page, which will then forward to the first search result. It’s highly recommended that you cache the results of your argot rendering as searching google for each url every time a page is loaded will be extremely slow.

writing new link processors

Link processors are functions that take a single argument, the query as a string, and return another string:

def wiki_processor(query):
    return google_processor('wikipedia %s' % query)
argot.enable_link_processor(wiki_processor)

This hypothetical wiki processor merely does a google search for ‘wikipedia’ and the query provided. The tag for the processor can be provided in 3 ways:

• the name of the function before the first underscore

• a tag attribute on the function

• an optional second argument to enable_link_processor

argot command line tool

Like markdown, argot ships with a command line tool that will convert text files to html called argot. It’s usage is:

Usage: argot [options] file

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -r REFERER, --referer=REFERER
                        http referer for google link parser
  -d, --document        render as full html document
  -t TITLE, --title=TITLE
                        title to use in HEAD (implies -d)
  -s STYLE, --style=STYLE
                        pygments style to use

With the -d option, argot will create a full HTML document with the specified pygments style (defaults to default).