How to Use Mistune¶

Mistune is super easy to use. Here is how you can convert Markdown formatted text into HTML:

import mistune

mistune.html(YOUR_MARKDOWN_TEXT)

The .html() methods has enabled all the features you might want by default:

No escape of HTML tags
With strikethrough plugin
With table plugin
With footnote plugin

Customize Mistune¶

Mistune provides a function to create Markdown instance easily:

import mistune

markdown = mistune.create_markdown()

This method will create a “escaped” Markdown instance without any plugins, which means:

markdown('<div>hello</div>')
# ==>
'<p>&lt;div&gt;hello&lt;/div&gt;</p>'

Non escaped version:

markdown = mistune.create_markdown(escape=False)
markdown('<div>hello</div>')
# ==>
'<div>hello</div>'

Adding plugins:

markdown = mistune.create_markdown()
markdown('~~s~~')
# ==>
'<p>~~s~~</p>'

markdown = mistune.create_markdown(plugins=['strikethrough'])
markdown('~~s~~')
# ==>
'<p><del>s</del></p>'

Find out what plugins mistune has built-in in Built-in Plugins sections.

Customize Renderer¶

Mistune supports renderer feature which enables developers to customize the output. For instance, to add code syntax highlight:

import mistune
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import get_lexer_by_name
from pygments.formatters import html


class HighlightRenderer(mistune.HTMLRenderer):
    def block_code(self, code, info=None):
        if info:
            lexer = get_lexer_by_name(info, stripall=True)
            formatter = html.HtmlFormatter()
            return highlight(code, lexer, formatter)
        return '<pre><code>' + mistune.escape(code) + '</code></pre>'

markdown = mistune.create_markdown(renderer=HighlightRenderer())

print(markdown('```python\nassert 1 == 1\n```'))

In this way, we can use Pygments to highlight the fenced code. Learn more at Renderers.

Abstract syntax tree¶

Mistune can produce AST by default without any renderer:

markdown = mistune.create_markdown(renderer=None)

This markdown function will generate a list of tokens instead of HTML:

text = 'hello **world**'
markdown(text)
# ==>
[
    {
        'type': 'paragraph',
        'children': [
            {'type': 'text', 'raw': 'hello '},
            {'type': 'strong', 'children': [{'type': 'text', 'raw': 'world'}]}
        ]
    }
]

It is also possible to pass renderer='ast' to create the markdown instance:

markdown = mistune.create_markdown(renderer='ast')