Markdown In Rust

There are many crates for generating markdown in Rust. I choose the comrak crate due to its options and flexibility, and I found it to be fairly fast which doesn't hurt. It has some great markdown extensions, and is very easy to use (specifying the options is the hardest part, which is not very hard, especially if you use ComrakOptions::default()).

Setup

I have been using an older version of comrak, the 0.2.5 version. I believe it is up to 0.2.8 or higher. If you wish to use the most updated version of Comrak you should know that the 0.2.8 version adds a default_info_string field to the options, which takes a Option<string>, all code is written using the 0.2.5 version (and thus does not have the default_info_string field).

Cargo.toml

comrak = "0.2.5"

main.rs

extern crate comrak;

use comrak::{markdown_to_html, ComrakOptions};

Usage & Options

The options (as of 0.2.5). You can use the markdown_to_html() method which takes a &str containing markdown and a &ComrakOptions structure reference. The ComrakOptions::default() can be used to use default values for the options.

The options look like:

pub const COMRAK_OPTIONS: ComrakOptions = ComrakOptions {
    hardbreaks: true,            // \n => <br>\n
    width: 120usize,             // Column width in characters
    // Use the GitHub style <pre lang="blah"> for fenced code blocks
    github_pre_lang: false,
    
    // If you are using version 0.2.8 uncomment the following:
    // default_info_string: Some(String::from("rust"))
    
    ext_strikethrough: true,     // hello ~world~ person.
    ext_tagfilter: true,         // filters out certain html tags
    ext_table: true,             // | a | b |\n|---|---|\n| c | d |
    ext_autolink: true,          // automatically recognize links
    ext_tasklist: true,          // * [x] Done\n* [ ] Not Done
    ext_superscript: true,       // e = mc^2^
    ext_header_ids: None,        // None / Some("some-id-prefix-".to_string())
    ext_footnotes: true,         // Hi[^x]\n\n[^x]: A footnote here\n
};

And that's pretty much it.