Markdown to plain text in Ruby?

Question

I\'m currently using BlueCloth to process Markdown in Ruby and show it as HTML, but in one location I need it as plain text (without some of the Markdown). Is there a way to

Answer 1

It's not ruby, but one of the formats Pandoc now writes is 'plain'. Here's some arbitrary markdown:

# My Great Work

## First Section

Here we discuss my difficulties with [Markdown](http://wikipedia.org/Markdown)

## Second Section

We begin with a quote:

> We hold these truths to be self-evident ...

then some code:

    #! /usr/bin/bash

That's *all*. 

(Not sure how to turn off the syntax highlighting!) Here's the associated 'plain':

My Great Work
=============

First Section
-------------

Here we discuss my difficulties with Markdown

Second Section
--------------

We begin with a quote:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident ...

then some code:

    #! /usr/bin/bash

That's all.

You can get an idea what it does with the different elements it parses out of documents from the definition of plainify in pandoc/blob/master/src/Text/Pandoc/Writers/Markdown.hs in the Github repository; there is also a tutorial that shows how easy it is to modify the behavior.