Convert HTML to Markdown

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.

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!