lua-discount

A binding to Discount, a fast C implementation of the Markdown text to HTML markup system. Discount passes the Markdown test suite.

Project links

• Home
• Download
• Documentation
• Source

Release history

• lua-discount-1.2.10.1 (2008-09-22)
  • Windows is now a supported platform (thanks to contributions from Tim Channon)
• lua-discount-1.2.10 (2008-09-03)
  • update to upstream Discount 1.2.10
  • support the "nohtml" option, to disable embedded html.
  • compile to use relaxed emphasis, meaning underscores don't count when they're in the middle of a word.
  • add some tests
  • include results of a simple benchmark in the readme
• lua-discount-1.2.7 (2008-08-03)
  • first public release

See also

• Discount
• Markdown syntax
• markdown.lua

Performance

Thanks to the underlying Discount implementation, lua-discount is incredibly fast. Benchmarking markdown.lua 0.32 against lua-discount 1.2.10 by parsing the Markdown syntax document 100 times gives the following result (all figures are in seconds):

                   user     system      total       real
lua-discount   0.170000   0.000000   0.170000   0.177374
markdown.lua  48.530000   0.000000  48.530000  48.524910

Usage

Note that require("discount") returns a single function, which you are responsible for giving a suitable name. Example:

discount = require("discount")

local markdown_string = [[
  # Demonstration
  This is a demonstration of lua-discount. Passing the options `"nolinks"` 
  disables links such as [this](http://example.com).
  ]]

  local html_string = discount(markdown_string, "nolinks")

The discount function takes as its first argument the Markdown string to convert, and for its subsequent arguments takes any combination of the following strings as options:

"nolinks"

do not allow <a or expand Markdown links.

"noimages"

do not allow <img or expand Markdown images.

"nopants"

disable SmartyPants processing.

"nohtml"

disallow embedded html by replacing all < with <.

"tagtext"

don't expand * or _ when used for emphasis.

"noext"

do not process pseudo-protocols

"cdata"

generate output suitable for use as data in an XML document.

"embed"

equivalent to specifying "nolinks", "noimages" and "tagtext".

License and acknowledgements

lua-discount is distributed under a BSD-style license.

Thanks to Tim Channon for Windows support.

This product includes software developed by David Loren Parsons.

Contact

Author: A.S. Bradbury
Email: asb@asbradbury.org
Homepage: http://asbradbury.org/