readme.md

This is a fork of Spirit Markdown - a Markdown to HTML converter written by Alastair Rankine in C++ using Boost.Spirit as parser/generator engine.

Original source files retrieved from

• https://launchpad.net/spirit-markdown
• http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~arankine/spirit-markdown/trunk/files/94/

Spirit Markdown

Originally written by Alastair Rankine alastair@girtby.net, 2010, with the following comments:

Spirit Markdown is an implementation of a Markdown syntax parser using the Spirit parser library. It is a single pass parser for Markdown, and is written in C++, so it should be extremely fast. It is written to parse the input to an internal document object representation, which allows flexibility in output generation. Also, a complete suite of unit tests are provided, to ensure against functional regressions in the future.

Spirit Markdown is currently quite immature and so performance may not yet be comparable with some other Markdown implementations. There are many optimizations to be made, both in the parser rules and in the code itself. For now, the emphasis is on correctness, specifically satisfying the complete requirements of the Markdown language.

The intention with this fork is to bring it up to level with other CommonMark parsers/generators. Additionally it might be worth to explore adding extensions, e.g. such as tables.

How to build

To build use CMake.

💡 As of this writing the Debug version is always built. To remove this, outcomment the following line in CMakeLists.txt:

...
#set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Debug)
...

1. Get the source.

2. Create build directory:

   $ mkdir build
   $ cd build
   

3. Initialize/configure CMake:

   $ cmake ..
   

4. Build it:

   $ make
   

Tests

There are - as of this writing - about 44 tests included; all written using Boost.Test unit tests.

Note that I haven't (yet) checked whether theses matches the standard test suites available from respectively John Grubers and/or CommonMark and it would certainly be nice to have verified that all these are covered.

To run tests

The CMakeLists.txt actually contains two ways to run the same unit tests. One integrated with CTest and one using Alistair's original method:

1. CTest unit test output

   $ make test
   

2. Boost unit test output

   $ make boosttest
   

   A successful test run should output:

   Running 44 test cases...
   
   *** No errors detected
   

To Do

• Verify/examine that all unit tests are running. Resolve those which fails.
• Ensure that unit tests matching the John Grubers standard unit tests (downloaded here) are part of unit tests. Missing ones should be added.
• Ensure that unit tests matching the CommonMark unit tests (found here) are part of unit tests. Missing ones should be added.
• ... other?

Ideas

• Unit tests from other sources, e.g. https://github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite
• Add performance measurements to compare with other implementations.

License

Open Source - Boost Software License.