Introduction #

Sometimes I wonder how to do things. And then I remember there is a documentation. In that case I wanted to render the table of contents (TOC) using Blackfriday so that articles written and served with smallblog can have a nicer structure.

Fact is, Blackfriday (the markdown renderer smallblog is using) can already do such a task for you, but there is no actual example of using this feature unless you start looking at the source code.

Setting up your own renderer #

Blackfriday has a lot of flags you can customize your render with. Let’s create a new simple package.

package renderer

import . "github.com/russross/blackfriday"

var flags = 0 |
	HTML_USE_XHTML |
	HTML_USE_SMARTYPANTS |
	HTML_SMARTYPANTS_FRACTIONS |
	HTML_SMARTYPANTS_DASHES |
	HTML_SMARTYPANTS_LATEX_DASHES |
	HTML_TOC

var extensions = 0 |
	EXTENSION_NO_INTRA_EMPHASIS |
	EXTENSION_TABLES |
	EXTENSION_FENCED_CODE |
	EXTENSION_AUTOLINK |
	EXTENSION_STRIKETHROUGH |
	EXTENSION_SPACE_HEADERS |
	EXTENSION_HEADER_IDS |
	EXTENSION_BACKSLASH_LINE_BREAK |
	EXTENSION_DEFINITION_LISTS

func HTML(input []byte) []byte {
    r := HtmlRenderer(flags, "", "")
    return MarkdownOptions(input, r, Options{Extensions: extensions})
}

Here we’re simply re-using the flags and extensions used for the blackfriday.MarkdownCommon function, with the exception we added the HTML_TOC flag. Also note that we used the dot import mecanism to simplify our code.

Use your renderer #

You can then use import your package and do something like this :

package main

import (
    "fmt"

    "github.com/user/project/renderer"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println(renderer.HTML([]byte(`your markdown`)))
}

You will notice that now you have a nice table of contents matching your titles on top of your rendered HTML.