I found it pretty easy to extend redcarpet's parser in Ruby for my rails 3 app. It wasn't scary at all.
First, start by deriving a class from Redcarpet's HTML renderer and override the preprocess method as recommended in the docs. In Rails 3.2 and Rails 4, this file can go anywhere and you don't need to require it. I use a 'services' folder to hold code like this.
# app/services/my_flavored_markdown.rb
class MyFlavoredMarkdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
def preprocess(text)
text
end
end
Next step is to add methods that do text substitutions you want. Here I use regex to wrap text that looks like "@mention" in an HTML span tag with a css class 'mention'.
# app/services/my_flavored_markdown.rb
class MyFlavoredMarkdown < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
def preprocess(text)
wrap_mentions(text)
end
def wrap_mentions(text)
text.gsub! /(^|\s)(@\w+)/ do
"#{$1}<span class='mention'>#{$2}</span>"
end
text
end
end
You could just as easily look up a user's profile page and wrap the @mention in an anchor tag instead. In my case, I also made methods for emoticons and hashtags that worked the same way and chained the methods together.
The last step is to add a helper that accepts some text, creates an instance of your Redcarpet-derived class, passes the text into that for processing, and returns the html result.
# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
def flavored_markdown_to_html(text)
renderer = MyFlavoredMarkdown.new()
# These options might be helpful but are not required
options = {
safe_links_only: true,
no_intra_emphasis: true,
autolink: true
}
Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, options).render(text)
}
In your views you can call it like this:
<%= flavored_markdown_to_html("This is something worth @mentioning") %>
The output would then be:
This is something worth <span class='mention'>@mentioning</span>.
