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Precisely which type of markdown (afaik there are quite a few variants) and editor (the one I am typing in right now) is Stack Overflow using?

I understand, there must be a JavaScript realtime implementation (which shows me the preview below). Where could I get that?

I hope there's also a PHP implementation, so I can turn markdown into HTML in the backend?

Ultimately I want to turn a very proprietary wordpress theme into being markdown based, since I find this the exact right balance between complexity and ease of use. Many 'wiki syntaxes' are in my opinion off to one side or the other.

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    The de facto standard Markdown library for PHP is PHP Markdown.
    – user149432
    May 21, 2012 at 8:54
  • 1
    See We're switching to CommonMark. The answers here are (mostly) obsolete now. (They still use some of their own Markdown implementations for Stack-Exchange-specific features.) Jun 25, 2020 at 1:56

2 Answers 2

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You're looking for:

  • MarkdownSharp - C# Markdown processor
  • pagedown - A JavaScript Markdown converter and editor
  • prettify - A Javascript module and CSS file that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets in an html page.

You can find the full supported Markdown syntax in the editing help page.

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StackExchange uses the MarkdownSharp implementation, written in C#. Converting it to php would likely be quite the task.

See also: Which tools and technologies build the Stack Exchange Network?

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