Forum: Redcloth Strip out RedCloth markup?

Is there a way in RedCloth to go from text with Textile markup in it to
plain text without the markup? Not just <pre> or <notextile> that passes
it through, but actually strips out the textile markup glyphs so
something like

*word*

ends up just being

word

in the output?

thanks.

No, not currently.  You could write a plain text formatter like the
HTML formatter in (the forthcoming) RedCloth 4.0.  Then you rewrite
the methods so it passes through the text you want but doesn't add HTML.

If you want to hack on it, fork the project on github and let me know
when you have something interesting.

Out of curiousity, what are you using this for?

The site I'm working on has a batch email function and I'd like the user 
to be able to user Textile for creating their HTML formatted email. 
However, I've set up action mailer to do multipart emails in case 
recipient is on a plain text client. So, for the HTML mailer template I 
use the .to_html output for the body text, and for the plain text mailer 
template I want to strip out the markup.

Right now I'm just sending through the marked up text, which isn't 
horrible if you keep it simple, but links, for instance, really come 
through badly.

Thanks for the input.

Okay, that's what I suspected.  I have had that need at times too.
Maybe it would be nice, instead of just outputting the text with no
formatting, to do a little plain text formatting exclusively for
human consumption (unlike Textile or Markdown).  Like:

Header 1
=======

This is a link (http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/redcloth) and
perhaps some *bold* text.

Now, you specifically *didn't* want the asterisks around bold
phrases, didn't you?  What do you think?

Not so much _I_ didn't want the asterisks, but client does not like the 
output that way.

I think I see what you're getting at, though - would this be a matter of 
setting up custom RedCloth rules to apply the "plain text" formatting 
they want to end up with, and then perhaps a custom method to apply 
those rules instead of the normal ones, such as ".to_plain_formatted"?

Exactly.  See the LaTeX formatter someone added and do likewise.

Jason Garber wrote:
> Exactly.  See the LaTeX formatter someone added and do likewise.

Coolio - will start working on that. Thanks for your help.

Cayce, any luck building that plain text formatter?  I've got a
"base" module that the other formatters build off of, but I'm
thinking, "Hey, why not let them build off of a plain text formatter?"

Excuses, excuses, where's that box of excuses I keep around here 
somewhere...

No, I haven't. The particular client I was working with when I posted 
the question decided to go with plain text for their email function. The 
project for me to work on that formatter subsequently got moved to the 
back-burner behind some higher priority work. I still have aims to do 
it, because I know it'll be needed in the future - I'll notify on this 
thread when I get there.


Jason Garber wrote:
> Cayce, any luck building that plain text formatter?  I've got a
> "base" module that the other formatters build off of, but I'm
> thinking, "Hey, why not let them build off of a plain text formatter?"