Python : How to convert markdown formatted text to text

Despite the fact that this is a very old question, I’d like to suggest a solution I came up with recently. This one neither uses BeautifulSoup nor has an overhead of converting to html and back.

The markdown module core class Markdown has a property output_formats which is not configurable but otherwise patchable like almost anything in python is. This property is a dict mapping output format name to a rendering function. By default it has two output formats, ‘html’ and ‘xhtml’ correspondingly. With a little help it may have a plaintext rendering function which is easy to write:

from markdown import Markdown
from io import StringIO


def unmark_element(element, stream=None):
    if stream is None:
        stream = StringIO()
    if element.text:
        stream.write(element.text)
    for sub in element:
        unmark_element(sub, stream)
    if element.tail:
        stream.write(element.tail)
    return stream.getvalue()


# patching Markdown
Markdown.output_formats["plain"] = unmark_element
__md = Markdown(output_format="plain")
__md.stripTopLevelTags = False


def unmark(text):
    return __md.convert(text)

unmark function takes markdown text as an input and returns all the markdown characters stripped out.