Convert HTML to Markdown

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Simple Image Lazy Load and Fade

    One of the quickest and easiest website performance optimizations is decreasing image loading.  That means a variety of things, including minifying images with tools like ImageOptim and TinyPNG, using data URIs and sprites, and lazy loading images.  It's a bit jarring when you're lazy loading images and they just...

  • By
    Fading Links Using jQuery:  dwFadingLinks

    UPDATE: The jQuery website was down today which caused some issues with my example. I've made everything local and now the example works. Earlier this week, I posted a MooTools script that faded links to and from a color during the mouseover and mouseout events.

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!