Erasmus

A simple tool for literate programming.

Overview

In it's current version, Erasmus is a very simple tool to extract all the code blocks in a markdown document for further processing (e.g. storing in a separate file).

Erasmus was born from the difficulty in achieving such a simple task with more complex tools such as litpro.

Installation

Erasmus is available through NPM, to install it globally as a CLI tool use:

npm install -g erasmus

If you want to install it locally to your project to use it as a dependency, then just use the following command from the project's folder:

npm install --save erasmus

Usage

Erasmus is designed following the UNIX principles, running the following command will print out the code extracted from a markdown document to the terminal:

erasmus document.md

To save the extracted code to a file, use IO redirection:

erasmus document.md > code.js

Piping the output from another command is also supported through the -p/--pipe option:

cat document.md | erasmus -p > code.js

This makes it really easy to plug erasmus in your pipeline (e.g. in NPM scripts).

Erasmus can also be used programmatically as a Node.js module:

import { extractCode } from "erasmus";
 
const markdown = `Here's the code:
 
\`\`\`typescript
console.log("Literate programming is cool!");
\`\`\`
`;
 
// This will extract the code blocks from the markdown string passed in and
// return an array of strings for further processing, e.g. joining and saving
// to a file.
const blocks = extractCode(markdown);

An implementaion of a Transform stream is also provided. See the module's implementation for more information.

License

Erasmus is released under the MIT license.