June 9, 2010 11:28 PM

Spurred into action by a painful afternoon watching a client cope with html markup in much the same way that a fish copes with being on the deck of a trawler, I tracked down Text::MediawikiFormat, slipped it into my MovableType text formatter module, and dropped it in the plugins directory.

With the addition of quick-and-easy post-processor to tidy up the output (so £ encodes as £ links link and images img), formatting content is now rather more manageable.

For posterity, here's the extreme subset of Wikimedia markup I used to test the code …

You can italicize text by putting 2 apostrophes on each side.

3 apostrophes will embolden the text.

5 apostrophes will embolden and italicize the text.

(Using 4 apostrophes doesn't do anything special -- the last pair are just 'left over ones' that are included as part of the text.)