Have the same README both in Markdown and reStructuredText
I have a project hosted on GitHub. For this I have written my README using the Markdown syntax in order to have it nicely formatted on GitHub.
As my project is in Python I also plan to upload it to PyPi. The syntax used for READMEs on PyPi is reStructuredText.
I would like to avoid having to handle two READMEs containing roughly the same content; so I searched for a markdown to RST (or the other way around) translator, but couldn't find any.
The other solution I see is to perform a markdown/HTML and then a HTML/RST translation. I found some ressources for this here and here so I guess it should be possible.
Would you have any idea that could fit better with what I want to do?
I would recommend Pandoc, the "swiss-army knife for converting files from one markup format into another" (check out the diagram of supported conversions at the bottom of the page, it is quite impressive). Pandoc allows markdown to reStructuredText translation directly. There is also an online editor here which lets you try it out, so you could simply use the online editor to convert your README files.
As @Chris suggested, you can use Pandoc to convert Markdown to RST. This can be simply automated using pypandoc module and some magic in setup.py:
from setuptools import setup
try:
from pypandoc import convert
read_md = lambda f: convert(f, 'rst')
except ImportError:
print("warning: pypandoc module not found, could not convert Markdown to RST")
read_md = lambda f: open(f, 'r').read()
setup(
# name, version, ...
long_description=read_md('README.md'),
install_requires=[]
)
This will automatically convert README.md to RST for the long description using on PyPi. When pypandoc is not available, then it just reads README.md without the conversion – to not force others to install pypandoc when they wanna just build the module, not upload to PyPi.
So you can write in Markdown as usual and don't care about RST mess anymore. ;)
The Markup library used by GitHub supports reStructuredText. This means you can write a README.rst file.
They even support syntax specific color highlighting using the code and code-block directives (Example)