Plaintext Renderer

[elespike]

Hello,

I've written a plaintext renderer that removes all markup. The inspiration for this is to facilitate NLP on a corpus of markdown documents. =)

Since I'm uncertain about a few things, I didn't want to make a PR just yet.

1. Is it generally correct? I just learned about markdown-it-py, so I'm not that familiar with the code. I did test it on a few documents, at least.
2. Do you think it's useful enough to include in the markdown-it-py repository, or as a plugin? (I'm not sure if renderers can be plugged in)
3. There's a dependency on markupsafe.striptags() - is that ok? Do you think there's a better way to deal with HTML tags?

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[chrisjsewell]

hey @elespike yeh looking good thanks.
I would probably say that it would be a separate repository, to keep this just the core code, and would "advertise" it in the documentation (as with the Markdown renderer #10 (comment))
Then its fine to have the markupsafe dependency.

Renders are certainly pluggable in the API:

md = MarkdownIt("commonmark", renderer_cls=RendererPlain)

Not currently via the CLI though, but that could be easily added if there is interest.

The next step I suggest, would be to add some test fixtures.
See, for example, https://github.com/executablebooks/markdown-it-py/blob/master/tests/test_port/test_fixtures.py and https://github.com/executablebooks/markdown-it-py/blob/master/tests/test_port/fixtures/smartquotes.md; the file defines a bunch of input Markdown and expected output texts:

Test description
.
input **markdown**
.
expected output
.

[elespike]

Excellent, thanks! I did notice renderer_cls, so if that's the way then I'm all set =)

I'll do some bug fixing and add some tests, then create a repository 👍

[elespike]

@chrisjsewell I've finally released the plaintext renderer:
https://github.com/elespike/mdit_plain

Where can I advertise it in the docs? Doesn't seem that a section for 3rd party plugins already exists.

[chrisjsewell]

Awesome cheers @elespike,
no there's not yet but indeed want to add one now as got mdit_plain (MD -> Plain), mdformat (MD -> MD), and myst-parser (MD -> Docutils/Sphinx).
Feel free to make a PR with a section, or I'll do it at some point

[elespike]

Cool, I'll see about adding a section - can't promise when =p

And just to confirm, the mdformat and myst-parser projects you mentioned are these ones, correct?

• https://github.com/executablebooks/mdformat
• https://github.com/executablebooks/myst-parser

I'll also close this issue unless you'd rather leave it until the docs PR goes through.