Conway-Markdown (conwaymd, CMD)

Conway-Markdown is:

• A replacement-driven markup language inspired by Markdown.
• A demonstration of the folly of throwing regex at a parsing problem.
• The result of someone joking that "the filenames would look like Windows executables from the 90s".
• Implemented in Python 3.{whatever Debian stable is at}.
• Licensed under "MIT No Attribution" (MIT-0), see LICENSE.

For detailed documentation, see <https://conwaymd.github.io/>.

Installation

Conway-Markdown is published to PyPI as conwaymd:

$ pip3 install conwaymd

• If simply using as a command line tool, do pipx instead of pip3 to avoid having to set up a virtual environment.
• If using Windows, do pip instead of pip3.

Usage (command line)

$ cmd [-h] [-v] [-a] [-x] [file.cmd ...]

Convert Conway-Markdown (CMD) to HTML.

positional arguments:
  file.cmd       name of CMD file to be converted (can be abbreviated as
                 `file` or `file.` for increased productivity)

options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -v, --version  show program's version number and exit
  -a, --all      convert all CMD files under the working directory
  -x, --verbose  run in verbose mode (prints every replacement applied)

On Windows:

• Use the aliases cmd- or conwaymd instead of cmd to avoid summoning Command Prompt.
• Beware not to run any .cmd files by accident; they might break your computer. God save!

Usage (scripting example)

Code:

from conwaymd.core import cmd_to_html

cmd_content = '''
# Test
==
- This is a *near*-minimal test.
- Here be [__dragons__].
==
[__dragons__]: https://example.com/
'''

html_content = cmd_to_html(cmd_content, cmd_file_name='scripting-test.py')

print(html_content)

Output:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Test</h1>
<ul>
<li>
This is a <em>near</em>-minimal test.
</li>
<li>
Here be <a href="https://example.com/"><b>dragons</b></a>.
</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>

Features

• Specify element attributes (e.g. id and class)
• Write arbitrary text outside code
• Use <b>, <i>, and <cite> elements, not just <strong> and <em>
• Use <div> elements without falling back to HTML
• Define your own syntax as you go