Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this “Marcus Downs” thing, and let me tell you, it was a bit of a journey. I’m not gonna lie, I stumbled a few times, but hey, that’s how we learn, right?
First things first, I had to figure out what I actually wanted to achieve. You know, set a goal. I decided I wanted to create a simple markdown parser. Nothing too fancy, just something to take basic markdown text and turn it into readable HTML.
Getting Started
I started by, well, researching. I Googled some stuff, read a few articles, and watched some videos. I wanted to get a good grasp of how markdown works and the logic behind parsing it.
Trial and Error
Next, I started coding. I used Python because, why not? It’s easy to work with. I created a new file and started typing away. The first version, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. It barely worked, and it was full of bugs. I mean, FULL of bugs.
I tested the code with a simple markdown string. I realized I was going to need a way to identify different markdown elements. This meant diving into regular expressions, which, if you’ve used them, you know can be a bit of a headache.
- I used `import re`.
- I started with headings. I crafted a regular expression to find lines starting with one or more ‘#’ characters.
- I then did the same to idenify bold and italic text.
Refining and Improving
After a lot of trial and error, and many, MANY cups of coffee, I had something that was starting to resemble a markdown parser. I implemented features for headings, bold text, italic text, and even lists.
The Final Product (Kind Of)
It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. But it’s something. It can take a basic markdown string and turn it into somewhat presentable HTML. I learned a ton along the way, and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?
And that was my markdown parser journey, messy but memorable!
