Converting Text

Converting Text

To use pandoc to convert text, specify an output file, then feed it input files. You can also specify input and output formats, and use some basic pandoc flags to control how the process goes.

To specify an output file, use the -o or --output flag.

All other file names passed on the command line are interpreted as input files.

For example, to convert text to HTML, we can either convert the text into a fragment of HTML, or into a full, standalone document using the -s or --standalone flag:

$ pandoc -o output.html input.txt       # generate a fragment of html
$ pandoc -s -o output.html input.txt    # generate a standalone html document

To specify formats, use the -t or --to flag, and the -f or --from flag. For example, converting from Github-flavored Markdown (gfm) to HTML looks like:

$ pandoc -f gfm -t html -o my_cool_html_file.html my_cool_markdown_file.md

See list of formats.

If no output file is specified, output will go to stdout. This enables pandoc to be chained together with other tools into pipelines.

In that spirit, input to pandoc can also come from stdin. To make pandoc a component of a data pipeline, simply feed input from stdin and pipe output from stdout:

$ cat my_cool_markdown_file.md | pandoc -f gfm -t html | ...

We can also generate and convert documents on the fly from the command line:

$ echo "# Hello World

[this is the earth](https://earth.com)" | pandoc -f gfm -t html

<h1 id="hello-world">Hello World</h1>
<p><a href="https://earth.com">this is the earth</a></p>