Markdown to HTML Converter

Markdown is a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber in 2004. It lets you write formatted text using plain-text syntax that's easy to read and write. Markdown files use the .md or .markdown extension and are widely used for README files, documentation, blog posts, and notes.

The beauty of Markdown is that it's human-readable even before conversion — a heading with # is obvious, **bold** text is self-evident, and lists with - or 1. need no explanation. This makes Markdown ideal for collaborative writing and version-controlled documentation.

While Markdown is great for writing, the web speaks HTML. Converting Markdown to HTML is essential when publishing content on websites, embedding formatted text in web applications, or generating email templates from Markdown source files.

Many content management systems, static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby), and documentation platforms accept Markdown input and convert it to HTML internally. Understanding the HTML output helps debug formatting issues and customize styles.

This converter processes Markdown in several passes. First, fenced code blocks are extracted and protected from further processing. Then inline code is handled similarly. The remaining text is HTML-escaped for safety, and Markdown syntax is converted to corresponding HTML tags: # becomes <h1>, **text** becomes <strong>, and so on.

Lists are grouped by detecting consecutive lines starting with - or numbers, and blockquotes are collected from consecutive > lines. Finally, remaining text blocks are wrapped in <p> tags, and protected code blocks are restored.

Markdown has become a cornerstone of developer workflows. GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket render Markdown in READMEs, issues, and pull requests. Documentation tools like Docusaurus, MkDocs, and VuePress use Markdown as their primary content format.

Beyond development, Markdown is used in note-taking apps (Obsidian, Bear, Notion), academic writing (Pandoc converts Markdown to LaTeX and PDF), and even Slack and Discord use Markdown-like formatting for messages.