Flavoured Markdown

Websafe Markdown with some extra flavour.

Markdown is a way to use an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format that is turned into valid XHTML or HTML. See the Markdown Syntax at Daring Fireball.

It's important to realize that Markdown by default accepts any HTML code as its source. If you use Markdown as a way for your users to enter text easily via a web interface, providing easy markup capabilities, they could potentially enter harmful code (javascripts, styles, etc.). Flavoured Markdown escapes all HTML code by default.

The extra flavors provided by Flavoured Markdown:

• Do not allow javascript, styles and HTML codes
• Except for A tags that have no on* attributes
• And except for BR tags
• HTML entities are alllowed (e.g.: ©, &, etc.)
• URLs and emails are automatically hyperlinked. Long hyperlinks are automatically limited to 55 characters.
• Three consecutive dots are replaced by an ellipsis character
• Fancy pants mode
• Prevents paragraphs and list items from having an orphan.

flavoured_markdown("# Hello World #\n----\n* Item A\n* Item B")

This gem/plugin depends on the rdiscount and actionpack gems. To install, run:

$ sudo gem install rdiscount
$ sudo gem install actionpack

Use this if you prefer to use versioned releases of Flavoured Markdown. Specify the gem dependency in your config/environment.rb file:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.gem "flavoured_markdown", :source => "http://gemcutter.org"
end

Then:

$ rake gems:install
$ rake gems:unpack

Use this if you prefer to use the edge version of Flavoured Markdown within a Rails application:

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/lawrencepit/flavoured_markdown.git

No options. Hack it.

Written by Lawrence Pit.

Thanks to GitHub for their amazing services! GitHub has it's own GitHub Flavored Markdown. You can have yours too.

Copyright (c) 2009 Lawrence Pit, released under the MIT license