Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

The Markdown parsing library I'm using supports MDX, so it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with syntax for those components. I haven't done that yet, but mostly because I didn't want to go down that path until I knew there was interest and had a concrete use case or two to inform the query syntax.

If you want to open an enhancement request issue, I'm happy to take a look (PRs also welcome, but not required). If you're not on GitHub, let me know and we can figure out some other way to get the request tracked.

Thanks for taking a look at the project!

it's a shame when core feature development seems to lag. i've also been working w/ MDX lately & agree that support would be a great addition.

> This is because GitHub is not building the features we need, instead they are putting their energy towards the AI land grab.

You throw the ball to where it's going. Gitlab might be delivering more value in the short term, but if things wind up looking significantly different in ten years, they might be in for a world of hurt. Innovator's dilemma is real.

It's a danger to ignore the tectonic changes happening. It's also incredibly risky to lean fully in, because we're not sure where the value accrues or which systems are the most important to build. It doesn't seem like foundation models are it.

It's smart to build basic scaffolding, let the first movers make all the expensive mistakes, then integrate the winning approaches into your platform. That requires a lot of energy though.

I don't think anyone ever really expected to see widespread use of regexes to alter the structure of a Markdown document. Honestly, while something like "look for numbers and surround them with double-asterisks to put them in boldface" is feasible enough (and might even work!), I can't imagine that a lot of people would do that sort of thing very often (or want to) anyway.

If a document is supposed to have structure - even something as simple as nested lists of paragraphs - it doesn't seem realistic to expect regular text manipulation tools to do a whole lot with them. Something like "remove the second paragraph of the third entry in the fourth bullet-point list" is well beyond any sane use of any regex dialect that might be powerful enough. (Keeping in mind that traditional regexes can't balance brackets; presumably they can't properly track indentation levels either.)

See also: TOML - generally quite human-editable, but still very much structured with potentially arbitrary nesting.

Definitely, but it's neat nonetheless because more and more things are "structured Markdown" these days. Extremely useful for AI reasoning and outputs.

> because you could use regular find/grep to analyze it

They were meant to be analyzable in some ways. Count lines, extract headers, maybe sed-replace some words. But being able to operate/analyze over multiline strings was never a strong point of unix tools.

I've never had a need for parsing markdown like this, bit I have to wonder, would it make to go through HTML instead, given that it's what markdown is designed to compile to? At that point, I'd assume there's any number of existing XML tools that work work, and my (maybe naive) assumption is that typical markdown documents would be relatively flat compared to how deeply nested "native" HTML/XML often gets, so it doesn't seem like most queries would require particularly complex XPath to be able to specify.

I'm curious how ergonomic you find that? I did look at the pandoc JSON initially, and found it fairly awkward to work with. It's a great interchange format, but doesn't seem optimized for either human interaction or scripting. (It's definitely possible to use it for scripting, it just felt cumbersome to me, personally.)

Curious, which license can't you use at work for a simple shell tool? Considering you're not linking against it, even GPL3 should be okay, right?

For the markdown, I'm using https://github.com/wooorm/markdown-rs, which is a formal parser that produces an AST. For the query language, I have a very simple hand-rolled parser.