How to easily convert format from Markdown

I was asked to create a product manual with a mechanism similar to a simplified version of O'Reilly Atlas. I wanted to use Asciidoctor to create the manual, so I decided to write it in AsciiDoc format, but it was easier to get used to Markdown format, so I had to convert from Markdown format to AsciiDoc format. It was. I thought I could afford to use pandoc, but I couldn't convert as I intended.

What I looked up

If you use pandoc, you should study Haskell and fix it, but I don't have time, so I wondered if I could make a conversion program using Python's Markdown parser library.

The table is as follows.

Python-Markdown is a path because you can't customize the output. Misaka seems to be dead, but it's a pass because it depends on Hoedown.

I decided to use Mistune by the elimination method, so I will implement it using this.

Easy to use

Installation

It seems to work with Python 2.6 or higher, so I confirmed the operation with 2.7.11.

pip install mistune

It's easy!

Convert from Markdown to HTML

We have prepared the following Markdown format files and sources for HTML conversion. It is almost the same as what is written in the official Basic Usage.

test.md

#Sample documentation
##Chapter XX
###Section XXX

convert.py

import mistune

with open('test.md', 'r') as test_file:
    markdown = mistune.Markdown()
    print markdown(test_file.read())

And run it.

python convert.py

Then, the output result is as follows.

output

<h1>Sample documentation</h1>
<h2>Chapter XX</h2>
<h3>Section XXX</h3>

Since it is partially applied, it seems good to prepare a template separately from the HTML definition etc. and make it as if rewriting only the contents of the Body.

Convert from Markdown to free format

Now the main subject.

It seems that mistune should inherit the Renderer class and override the item (method) you want to output. This time, I want to replace the heading tag with section in AsciiDoc format, so I made it as follows.

custom_render.py

import mistune

class CustomRenderer(mistune.Renderer):
    def header(self, text, level, raw=None):
        section = '=' * level
        return '{0} {1}\n'.format(section, text)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    custom_renderer = CustomRenderer()
    with open('test.md', 'r') as test_file:
        markdown = mistune.Markdown(renderer=custom_renderer)
        print markdown(test_file.read())

I will do it.

python custom_render.py

The result is as follows.

output

=Sample documentation
==Chapter XX
===Section XXX

I got the results I expected!

After that, if you override the method from the required syntax and arrange the output format, you can convert the format.