Multimarkdown

Multimarkdown is sort of next-generation Markdown; the main project has transitioned out of Perl into C for performance and now addresses all kinds of output.

The output I'm interested in is just the parsed structure - the DOM, if you will. I'm torn between recycling their parsing code (which doesn't actually parse everything I want, but works and works well) and writing my own parser (which usually leads to everything in flames and me losing my hat).

There is, of course, a Text::MultiMarkdown - but it doesn't quite parse correctly and would have to be subclassed to add additional features. And there's Dave Rolsky's Markdent, which does actually provide an event-based Markdown parser but comes with an entire ecosystem of modules and doesn't appear all that easy to extend (unless you're quite familiar with the Moose paradigm).

But overall, you just can't get away from Markdown these days when writing content. So I just keep coming back to it.