Add option to export scan results as "markdown"

[bluetechy]

Short Description

As a user, I would like a command line option (e.g. --markdown) so that I can export the scan results in "markdown" format. This would enable the user to upload these markdown pages to a github wiki.

Possible Labels

• new feature

Select Category

• Enhancement
• Add License/Copyright
• Scan Feature
• Packaging
• Documentation
• Expand Support
• Other

Describe the Update

At the moment, there is already support for exporting scan results to JSON, CSV, HTML, and to a customize template. Being that markdown is one of the most popular formats used by programmers to document things in their repositories and wikis, it would be nice to have a quick way of doing this rather than have to create a custom template. I have tried converting HTML to markdown with a few different python libraries and it never converts properly mainly because the usage of the <caption> tag in the HTML format and it also leaves CSS styling in the page.

How This Feature will help you/your organization

This would allow me to commit the scan results to a wiki page (which renders markdown), for example, to github's wikis.

Possible Solution/Implementation Details

1. Add a new command line option such as --markdown FILE that will format the scan results accordingly; or,
2. Modify the HTML formatting so that it can better converted by (python) libraries like markdownify or html2markdown.

Example/Links if Any

docker run -v $PWD/:/output scancode-toolkit -clpeui --processes 4 --markdown /output/$FILENAME /output

Can you help with this Feature

[bluetechy]

I would prefer that the markdown resembles more like the HTML format than the CSV format. I am able to convert from CSV format to MD format, but previewing it is ugly and hard to read....that is why I prefer the HTML style of formatting for the markdown rather than the CSV style of formatting.

[pombredanne]

@bluetechy Thanks for the report. You wrote:

[...]
it would be nice to have a quick way of doing this rather than have to create a custom template.
[...]
This would allow me to commit the scan results to a wiki page (which renders markdown), for example, to github's wikis.

Have you tried to craft a custom template for this? These are standard Jinja2 templates and a markdown output could be as simple as an alias to a "custom" output.

This template work would have to done first in all cases. Do you mind to take a stab at it?

See https://scancode-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/stable/rst_snippets/custom_output_format.html?highlight=jinja for some hints.