xml back to markdown

[jeroen]

I was wondering if anyone has worked on a tool to convert the xml AST back to markdown? We would like to structurally edit markdown documents, preferably using xml tools (xpath, etc).

[nwellnhof]

I could probably whip up an XSLT stylesheet in half an hour.

[jeroen]

I think that would be fantastic.

[nwellnhof]

Here's a first attempt: https://gist.github.com/nwellnhof/1594ec597ae06836bc2f974641ec4df7

Note that a MD->XML->MD roundtrip will lose a bit of information.

@jgm If you like, I can commit the XSLT stylesheet to the tools directory.

[jeroen]

Thanks @nwellnhof ! This works quite well. Can you explain why verbatim html is not supported?

Also: I see your name appear in libxslt as well so I might as ask here: in my libxslt bindings the message <xsl:message>Unsupported element... currently triggers a hard error via xsltSetGenericErrorFunc. I guess in this case that is not appropriate and it should print to stderr without bailing.

Do you know if there any way in libxslt to distinguish a terminating from non terminating message in the xmlGenericErrorFunc callback?

[jgm]

Nick Wellnhofer <[email protected]> writes:

@jgm If you like, I can commit the XSLT stylesheet to the `tools` directory.

I think it would be useful to have there, yes!

[nwellnhof]

@jeroen The stylesheet in the pull request also handles HTML blocks and inlines.

libxslt will invoke the error handler for every <xsl:message> regardless of the terminate attribute. But unless terminate is set to yes, it will continue to process the stylesheet. There's no structured error facility like in libxml2.