Frontmatter Parsing With Python

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This is Day 4 of the #100DaysOfPython challenge.

This post will use the python-frontmatter library to parse an example markdown file with frontmatter to demonstrate how to parse metadata from your markdown files.
This can be a useful tool to colocate important information within your markdown that can be access when programmatically reading files!
Prerequisites
  • Familiarity with Pipenv. See here for my post on Pipenv.
  • Familiarity with JupyterLab. See here for my post on JupyterLab.
  • Frontmatter in MDX
  • Getting started
    Let's create the hello-frontmatter directory and install python-frontmatter. We will also need to add an example markdown file.
    # Make the `hello-frontmatter` directory
    $ mkdir hello-frontmatter
    $ cd hello-frontmatter
    # Create an example MDX file
    $ touch frontmatter-example.mdx
    
    # Init the virtual environment
    $ pipenv --three
    $ pipenv install python-frontmatter
    $ pipenv install --dev jupyterlab
    Inside of frontmatter-example.mdx add the following:
    ---
    title: "Henlo, FrontMatter"
    date: "2016-12-16"
    ---
    
    Henlo world, this is me.
    At this stage, we are ready to parse the file and get the metadata.
    Start up the notebook server:
    # Startup the notebook server
    $ pipenv run jupyter-lab
    # ... Server is now running on http://localhost:8888/lab
    The server will now be up and running.
    Creating the notebook
    Once on http://localhost:8888/lab, select to create a new Python 3 notebook from the launcher.
    Ensure that this notebook is saved in hello-frontmatter/docs/<your-file-name>.
    We will create three cells to handle each part of this project:
  • Import the python-frontmatter library and related modules for the os.path library to help determine the relative path.
  • Use the os.path imports to get the relative path to the file.
  • Load the frontmatter metadata from the file and print them to the console.
  • Importing the required libraries
    import frontmatter
    from os.path import join, dirname, abspath
    Get the relative path
    mdx_filepath = join(dirname(abspath("__file__")), '../frontmatter-example.mdx')
    print(mdx_filepath)
    # ... prints out path to the markdown file
    Load the frontmatter metadata
    Finally, we can use the frontmatter.load method to parse the frontmatter metadata from the file.
    post = frontmatter.load(mdx_filepath)
    print(post.keys())
    print(post['title']) # prints "Henlo, FrontMatter"
    print(post['date']) # prints "2016-12-16"
    Resources and further reading
    Originally posted on my blog. To see new posts without delay, read the posts there and subscribe to my newsletter.

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    Frontmatter Parsing With Python