marked/docs/USING_ADVANCED.md

The marked function

marked(markdownString [,options] [,callback])

Argument	Type	Notes
markdownString	string	String of markdown source to be compiled.
options	object	Hash of options. Can also use marked.setOptions.
callback	function	Called when markdownString has been parsed. Can be used as second argument if no options present.

Alternative using reference

// Create reference instance
const marked = require('marked');

// Set options
// `highlight` example uses `highlight.js`
marked.setOptions({
  renderer: new marked.Renderer(),
  highlight: function(code, language) {
    const hljs = require('highlight.js');
    const validLanguage = hljs.getLanguage(language) ? language : 'plaintext';
    return hljs.highlight(validLanguage, code).value;
  },
  pedantic: false,
  gfm: true,
  breaks: false,
  sanitize: false,
  smartLists: true,
  smartypants: false,
  xhtml: false
});

// Compile
console.log(marked(markdownString));

Options

Member	Type	Default	Since	Notes
baseUrl	string	null	0.3.9	A prefix url for any relative link.
breaks	boolean	false	v0.2.7	If true, add <br> on a single line break. Requires gfm be true.
gfm	boolean	true	v0.2.1	If true, use approved GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) specification.
headerIds	boolean	true	v0.4.0	If true, include an id attribute when emitting headings (h1, h2, h3, etc).
headerPrefix	string	''	v0.3.0	A string to prefix the id attribute when emitting headings (h1, h2, h3, etc).
highlight	function	null	v0.3.0	A function to highlight code blocks, see Asynchronous highlighting.
langPrefix	string	'language-'	v0.3.0	A string to prefix the className in a <code> block. Useful for syntax highlighting.
mangle	boolean	true	v0.3.4	If true, autolinked email address is escaped with HTML character references.
pedantic	boolean	false	v0.2.1	If true, conform to the original markdown.pl as much as possible. Don't fix original markdown bugs or behavior. Turns off and overrides gfm.
renderer	object	new Renderer()	v0.3.0	An object containing functions to render tokens to HTML. See extensibility for more details.
sanitize	boolean	false	v0.2.1	If true, sanitize the HTML passed into markdownString with the sanitizer function. Warning: This feature is deprecated and it should NOT be used as it cannot be considered secure. Instead use a sanitize library, like DOMPurify (recommended), sanitize-html or insane on the output HTML!
sanitizer	function	null	v0.3.4	A function to sanitize the HTML passed into markdownString.
silent	boolean	false	v0.2.7	If true, the parser does not throw any exception.
smartLists	boolean	false	v0.2.8	If true, use smarter list behavior than those found in markdown.pl.
smartypants	boolean	false	v0.2.9	If true, use "smart" typographic punctuation for things like quotes and dashes.
xhtml	boolean	false	v0.3.2	If true, emit self-closing HTML tags for void elements (<br/>, <img/>, etc.) with a "/" as required by XHTML.

Asynchronous highlighting

Unlike highlight.js the pygmentize.js library uses asynchronous highlighting. This example demonstrates that marked is agnostic when it comes to the highlighter you use.

marked.setOptions({
  highlight: function(code, lang, callback) {
    require('pygmentize-bundled') ({ lang: lang, format: 'html' }, code, function (err, result) {
      callback(err, result.toString());
    });
  }
});

console.log(marked(markdownString));

In both examples, code is a string representing the section of code to pass to the highlighter. In this example, lang is a string informing the highlighter what programming language to use for the code and callback is the function the asynchronous highlighter will call once complete.

Workers

To prevent ReDoS attacks you can run marked on a worker and terminate it when parsing takes longer than usual.

Marked can be run in a worker thread on a node server, or a web worker in a browser.

Node Worker Thread

// markedWorker.js

const marked = require('marked');
const { parentPort } = require('worker_threads');

parentPort.on('message', (markdownString) => {
  parentPort.postMessage(marked(markdownString));
});

// index.js

const { Worker } = require('worker_threads');
const markedWorker = new Worker('./markedWorker.js');

const markedTimeout = setTimeout(() => {
  markedWorker.terminate();
  throw new Error('Marked took too long!');
}, timeoutLimit);

markedWorker.on('message', (html) => {
  clearTimeout(markedTimeout);
  console.log(html);
  markedWorker.terminate();
});

markedWorker.postMessage(markdownString);

Web Worker

Note

: Web Workers send the payload from postMessage in an object with the payload in a .data property

// markedWorker.js

importScripts('path/to/marked.min.js');

onmessage = (e) => {
  const markdownString = e.data
  postMessage(marked(markdownString));
};

// script.js

const markedWorker = new Worker('./markedWorker.js');

const markedTimeout = setTimeout(() => {
  markedWorker.terminate();
  throw new Error('Marked took too long!');
}, timeoutLimit);

markedWorker.onmessage = (e) => {
  clearTimeout(markedTimeout);
  const html = e.data;
  console.log(html);
  markedWorker.terminate();
};

markedWorker.postMessage(markdownString);