Alternative parsers

This page is a list of links, descriptions, and status reports of the various alternative MediaWiki parsers&mdash;that is, programs and projects, other than MediaWiki itself, which are able or intended to translate MediaWiki's text markup syntax into something else. Some of these have quite narrow purposes, others are possible contenders for replacing the somewhat labyrinthine code that currently drives MediaWiki itself.

Many of the things linked here are likely to be out of date and under-maintained, even abandoned. But in the interest of not duplicating the same work over and over, it seemed sensible to collect together what was "out there".

Related topics

 * One-pass parser
 * MediaWiki lexer and MediaWiki flexer (not parsers as such, just grammar definitions; probably superseded by/within other projects below)
 * en:Wikipedia:Text editor support includes various scripts and extensions for things like syntax highlighting for things like EMACS, Vim, and all sorts; some of these may include rudimentary parsing capabilities.
 * Here are some proof of concept rules for a subset of the Mediawiki markup: these are written in a metalanguage that treats preformatted text as source text, and everything else as comment.
 * Markup spec aims to produce a specification of MediaWiki's markup format.
 * Help:Extension:ParserFunctions is the main parser extension for MediaWiki.

A non-parser dumper
One of the common uses of alternative parsers is to dump wiki content into static form, such as HTML or PDF. Tim Starling has written a script which isn't a parser, but uses the MediaWiki internal code to dump an entire wiki to HTML, from the command-line. See dumpHTML.php and dumpHTML.inc in the MediaWiki CVS repository. This has been used (years ago) to create the static dumps at http://static.wikipedia.org

Vacant or unknown/not listed

 * Tero-dump gives a 404 error.