Adding support for Markdown in Yaydoc

Yaydoc being based on sphinx natively supports reStructuredText. From the official docs:

reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system. It is useful for quickly creating simple web pages, and for standalone documents. reStructuredText is designed for extensibility for specific application domains.

Although it being superior to markdown in terms of features, Markdown is still the most heavily used markup language out there. This week we added support for markdown into Yaydoc. Now you can use Markdown to document your project and Yaydoc would create a site with no changes required from your end. To achieve this, we used recommonmark, which enables sphinx to parse CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown. It solved most of the problem with 3 lines of code in our customized conf.py .

from recommonmark.parser import CommonMarkParser

source_parsers = {
'.md': CommonMarkParser,
}

source_suffix = ['.rst', '.md']

With this addition, sphinx can now use recommonmark to convert markdown to html. But not everything has been solved. Here is an excerpt from a previous blogpost which explains a problem yet to be solved.

Now sphinx requires an index.rst file within docs directory  which it uses to generate the first page of the site. A very obvious way to fill it which helps us avoid unnecessary duplication is to use the include directive of reStructuredText to include the README file from the root of the repository. But the Include directive can only properly include a reStructuredText, not a markdown document. Given a markdown document, it tries to parse the markdown as  reStructuredText which leads to errors.

To solve this problem, a custom directive mdinclude was created. Directives are the primary extension mechanism of reStructuredText. Most of it’s implementation is a copy of the built in Include directive from the docutils package. Before including in the doctree, mdinclude converts the docs from markdown to reStructuredText using pypandoc. The implementation is similar to the one also discussed in a previous blogpost.

class MdInclude(rst.Directive):

required_arguments = 1
optional_arguments = 0

def run(self):
    if not self.state.document.settings.file_insertion_enabled:
        raise self.warning('"%s" directive disabled.' % self.name)
    source = self.state_machine.input_lines.source(
        self.lineno - self.state_machine.input_offset - 1)
    source_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(source))
    path = rst.directives.path(self.arguments[0])
    path = os.path.normpath(os.path.join(source_dir, path))
    path = utils.relative_path(None, path)
    path = nodes.reprunicode(path)

    encoding = self.options.get(
        'encoding', self.state.document.settings.input_encoding)
    e_handler = self.state.document.settings.input_encoding_error_handler
    tab_width = self.options.get(
        'tab-width', self.state.document.settings.tab_width)

    try:
        self.state.document.settings.record_dependencies.add(path)
        include_file = io.FileInput(source_path=path,
                                    encoding=encoding,
                                    error_handler=e_handler)
    except UnicodeEncodeError as error:
        raise self.severe('Problems with "%s" directive path:\n'
                          'Cannot encode input file path "%s" '
                          '(wrong locale?).' %
                          (self.name, SafeString(path)))
    except IOError as error:
        raise self.severe('Problems with "%s" directive path:\n%s.' %
                          (self.name, ErrorString(error)))

    try:
        rawtext = include_file.read()
    except UnicodeError as error:
        raise self.severe('Problem with "%s" directive:\n%s' %
                          (self.name, ErrorString(error)))

    output = md2rst(rawtext)
    include_lines = statemachine.string2lines(output,
                                              tab_width, 
                                              convert_whitespace=True)
    self.state_machine.insert_input(include_lines, path)
    return []

With this, Yaydoc can now be used on projects that exclusively use markdown. There are some more hurdles which we need to cross in the following weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.