montmark 0.0.6

Markdown pet project

Montmark

A lightweight, fast, pure-Python Markdown parser

Small. Walkable. Full of shortcuts. Sketched on a Parisian hill.

Introduction

Montmark turns Markdown into HTML. It is more than 90% compliant with CommonMark specification.

WORK IN PROGRESS! This is ALPHA quality software. Do not use it in production!

Plan

• Continue ongoing updates progressively improving CommonMark compliance toward to near 100%
• Add support for GitHub tables
• Add streaming mode for low-memory processing of very large files
• Optimize

Installation

As a package from PyPI

pip install montmark

As a standalone file

file montmark.py can be downloaded from GitHub or extracted from the PyPI package and used as a standalone script or module.

CLI

One of these for package:

montmark FILE
python3 -m montmark FILE

For standalone script:

python3 montmark.py FILE

the FILE argument may be a file path or - for standard input (stdin).

API

>>> import montmark
>>> html_string = montmark.convert(markdown_string)

Preliminary benchmark

Done with bench script and syntax.md sample from Mistletoe, on a 14th gen Intel Core i5 running Ubuntu 24.04

Parser	Execution Time (s)	Throughput (MB/s)
montmark 0.0.6	4.85	5.73
markdown_it 4.2.0	5.61	4.95
mistune 3.2.1	6.53	4.25
mistletoe 1.5.1	7.30	3.81
marko 2.2.3	23.30	1.19

CommonMark compliance

Section	OK	Total	% OK	Discrepancies
Tabs	10	11	90%	9
Backslash escapes	13	13	100%
Entity and numeric character references	17	17	100%
Precedence	1	1	100%
Thematic breaks	18	19	94%	61
ATX headings	18	18	100%
Setext headings	26	27	96%	91
Indented code blocks	11	12	91%	109
Fenced code blocks	29	29	100%
HTML blocks	38	44	86%	148,174,175,187,190,191
Link reference definitions	23	27	85%	201,208,209,210
Paragraphs	8	8	100%
Blank lines	1	1	100%
Block quotes	21	25	84%	235,237,238,252
List items	47	48	97%	300
Lists	22	26	84%	312,313,319,326
Inlines	1	1	100%
Code spans	22	22	100%
Emphasis and strong emphasis	126	132	95%	412,430,445,461,469,470
Links	79	90	87%	520,523,533,541,545,546,556,559,568,569,571
Images	17	22	77%	574,575,587,590,593
Autolinks	18	19	94%	610
Raw HTML	16	20	80%	616,619,629,632
Hard line breaks	14	15	93%	644
Soft line breaks	2	2	100%
Textual content	3	3	100%
ALL	601	652	92%

Open-Source, not Open-Contribution yet

Montmark is MIT licensed but is currently closed to contributions.

Personal note: this is a pet projet of mine and my time is limited. First I need to focus on my roadmap (new features and refactoring) and then I will happily accept contributions when everything is a little more stabilised.