Parsing Markdown into an HTML Tree: Designing the Intermediate Representation

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the easiest mistakes to make when building a Markdown-to-HTML converter is to think of the problem as string replacement.

Replace **text** with <strong>text</strong>.

Replace *text* with <em>text</em>.

Replace headings with <h1>.

At first, this seems sufficient.

It quickly becomes difficult once documents contain nested structures.

A more robust approach is to introduce an intermediate representation between Markdown and HTML.

Abstract Syntax Tree on Ikwuka Okoye