Abbreviations

Summary

The Abbreviations extension adds the ability to define abbreviations. Specifically, any defined abbreviation is wrapped in an <abbr> tag.

The Abbreviations extension is included in the standard Markdown library.

Note

This extension is in maintenance mode. We will continue to fix bugs and keep it up-to-date with the core parser, but no new features or changes in behavior will be made. If you need a feature that this extension does not offer, then you have three options (1) find an existing third-party extension which meets your needs, (2) build your own extension, or (3) fork this extension (pursuant to its licensing requirements) and maintain it as a third-party extension.

Syntax

Abbreviations are defined using the syntax established in PHP Markdown Extra.

Thus, the following text (taken from the above referenced PHP documentation):

The HTML specification
is maintained by the W3C.

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language
*[W3C]:  World Wide Web Consortium

will be rendered as:

<p>The <abbr title="Hyper Text Markup Language">HTML</abbr> specification
is maintained by the <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr>.</p>

The backslash (\) is not permitted in an abbreviation. Any abbreviation definitions which include one or more backslashes between the square brackets will not be recognized as an abbreviation definition.

Usage

See Extensions for general extension usage. Use abbr as the name of the extension.

The following options are provided to configure the output:

  • glossary: A dictionary where the key is the abbreviation and the value is the definition.

A trivial example:

markdown.markdown(some_text, extensions=['abbr'])

Disabling Abbreviations

When using the glossary option, there may be times when you need to turn off a specific abbreviation. To do this, set the abbreviation to '' or "".

The HTML abbreviation is disabled on this page.

*[HTML]: ''