Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown

There have been a few times I wanted the ability to select some text out of a Markdown doc. For example, a GitHub CI check to ensure that PRs / issues / etc are properly formatted.

This can be done to some extent with regex, but those expressions are brittle and hard to read or edit later. mdq uses a familiar pipe syntax to navigate the Markdown in a structured way.

It's in 0.x because I don't want to fully commit to the syntax being stable, in case real-world testing shows that the syntax needs tweaking. But I think the project is in a pretty good spot overall, and would be interested in feedback!

Show HN: Jq-Like Tool for Markdown
github.com

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.

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?

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.