Day 205: Mapping Markdown

Hello friends,

Currently I have something like this:

1. I pull in the json blocks into the recursive function.
2. I check whether or not it has children.
3. If it does call the function on it once again.
4. If it doesn't, check the type.

From here currently I have two options. Either it's type span, meaning I'll be wrapping some text in styling marks like italic or bold. Or it's something else, like a header.

If it's type span, I do something like this:

if (block.type === "span") {
  const marks = block.marks || [];

  const markMap = {
    bold: "**",
    italic: "*",
  };

  for (const mark of marks) {
    const token = markMap[mark];
    if (token) output.push(token);
  }

  if (block.text) output.push(block.text);

  for (const mark of marks.slice().reverse()) {
    const token = markMap[mark];
    if (token) output.push(token);
  }
}

What I'm trying to do here is first create an object that will hold my mapping values. Then I wrap the text in two loops. The first pushes the mapped string in order of the marks array. The second creates a temporary shallow copy of the array and reverses it before pushing it to the output.

I'm still in the process of identifying all the edge cases and I think I could benefit from drawing this all out since at the moment I feel like I'm going into this whole thing blind. I need to properly visualize how this function will traverse a tree of JSON blocks then I can freely create the function with a better overview.

But either way thanks for reading today's blog, until next time friend. Things are looking up.