Frontmatter Parsing With Python

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

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
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Inside of frontmatter-example.mdx add the following:

---
title: Henlo, FrontMatter
date: "2016-12-16"
---

Henlo world, this is me.
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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
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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:

Importing the required libraries

import frontmatter
from os.path import join, dirname, abspath
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Get the relative path

mdx_filepath = join(dirname(abspath("__file__")), '../frontmatter-example.mdx')
print(mdx_filepath)
# ... prints out path to the markdown file
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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"
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Resources and further reading