Convert HTML to Markdown

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One of my biggest mistakes with this blog was not finding a WordPress plugin that would allow me to write my posts with markdown; to this day I still need to write posts in "Visual" mode and then manually convert the post to HTML for "Text" mode.  One of these days I want to convert existing posts to Markdown and then enable a plugin that will convert Markdown to HTML. This painful process made me ask myself:  is there a way I can use Node.js JavaScript to convert HTML to Markdown?  There is, and it's called Turndown by Dom Christie.

Convert HTML to Markdown with Node.js

Start by installing Turndown:

yarn add turndown

Then use Turndown's simple API to convert HTML to markdown:

var TurndownService = require('turndown');
var turndownService = new TurndownService();

var markdown = turndownService.turndown(`
    

Title

DavidWalsh.Name is awesome!

`); /* Title ===== [DavidWalsh.Name](https://davidwalsh.name) is awesome! */

You can use the interactive Turndown demo to experiment with its capabilities.  Turndown has a number of options and allows you to use filters to keep elements you believe could be at risk for improper conversion.

Most developers look for a Markdown to HTML solution so it's rate to find myself in a position to need to convert HTML to Markdown.  I look forward to migrating my site's content to Markdown so that writing posts is much less stressful in the future!

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Discussion

  1. Hi David,

    there’s even more you can do with it!

    We explored it in a hackathon:
    Exporting content from Confluence using its ReST api and feed the markdown to a static site generator (like Netlify or Hapi.js).

    Was quite fun :-)

    Sadly I can’t share details because of work during business hours :-(

    Cheers

    André

  2. Jennifer

    Jetpack includes an option to write posts using Markdown. https://jetpack.com/support/markdown/

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!