For the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a side-project, a Markdown translator in C++. I finally finished the first release-quality version of it, so I’ve applied to release it on SourceForge, under the MIT license. Once it’s approved (and I don’t foresee any problems with that), the main page will be here.

Here’s a portion of the README file, to whet your appetite:

Cpp-Markdown is a freely-available Markdown text-to-HTML translator, written in C++, intended for integration into C++ programs rather than for use in web applications.

It differs from other Markdown translators in a few ways:

• It’s written in C++, making full use of C++ constructs such as classes, inheritance, I/O streams, and namespaces. This means that you get the full speed advantages of a compiled language, as well as easier integration into C++ programs.

• It’s a more accurate implementation of the Markdown specification than most of the currently-available ones. Its first release passes all 23 tests in the Markdown test suite, and 12 of the 17 tests in the PHP Markdown test suite, of MDTest 1.1.

• It is fully os-independent. It understands files that use DOS/Windows CR/NL line endings, Mac OSX CR line endings, or UNIX/Linux NL line endings. It is also designed to work with UTF-8 files, and can be extended to work with Unicode (UTF-16/UCS-2 or UTF-32/UCS-4) files with minimal effort.

• It is not a port of another existing implementation, but was written from scratch. That means you can use it in your own programs without worrying about any license other than Cpp-Markdown’s own very permissive one.

This README file is written in Markdown format, and an HTML version (translated by the stand-alone Cpp-Markdown program) is provided as well, so you can see exactly what it does.

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Why?

I originally wrote it because I wanted to use the Markdown format in one of my own C++ projects, and there was no existing C or C++ implementation that I liked. I’m releasing it as open-source because Markdown is an excellent and well-thought-out format, and I’d like to see it available in more programs.

I don’t expect that it will get all that much use, but I plan to continue supporting it for anyone who wants to use it.