section-remark

Specialized Remark that only transforms (or adds) one Markdown section.

Background

Remark works on an abstract syntax tree, which means some information is lost. Not semantics, but formatting, style, whitespace, i.e. your personal preferences. What's more, converting the AST back to markdown will add formatting and possibly result in unwanted diff noise.

Meant for sections of generated markdown, section-remark runs on a subset of the tree (a range of nodes starting with a certain header), stringifies it and concatenates the result with the rest of your markdown. Other sections are left alone.

Returns a unified processor, so like the regular remark, you can use any plugin.

Usage

As an example, let's generate a Contributors section:

const remark = require('section-remark')
const contributors = require('remark-contributors')
const report = require('vfile-reporter')
const vfile = require('to-vfile')
 
remark('Contributors')
  .use(contributors)
  .process(vfile.readSync('README.md'), function (err, file) {
    console.error(report(err || file))
    vfile.writeSync(file)
  })

This does nothing if the contributors section doesn't already exist. To either replace it or add it to the end of the document, do:

remark('Contributors', { add: true })

To replace it or add it after another section:

remark('Contributors', { after: 'API' })

We can use any test supported by mdast-util-heading-range. If we want to generate an API section and insert it after a usage or example section:

remark('API', { after: /^(usage|example)$/i })

Same goes for the first argument. If we want to replace or add a TOC:

remark(/^(table of )?contents$/i, { add: true })

This will throw an error though if the TOC doesn't exist, because section-remark can't convert the regular expression to a title. We should define the text option, so that a "Contents" header will be renamed to "Table of Contents". And let's insert the TOC before another section.

remark(/^(table of )?contents$/i, {
  text: 'Table of Contents',
  before: /^usage|example$/i
})

Lastly, if you use before or after and the section does not already exist, its header will inherit the depth of its before or after sibling.

API

sectionRemark(test[, options])

Returns a unified processor that transforms a section starting with a header which matches test (see mdast-util-heading-range). Options:

• add: add to end of document, if not found
• before: insert before section, if not found
• after: insert after section, if not found
• text: text content of header, defaults to test if a string
• depth: header depth, starting at 1, defaults to sibling depth or 2.

Install

With npm do:

npm install section-remark

License

MIT © Vincent Weevers