Fails to read from stdin

[rayellis4]

While the command
showdown makehtml -i foo.md > foo.html
works as expected, the command
showdown makehtml < foo.md > foo.html
produces an empty output file and the response

Enabling option ghCodeBlocks
Enabling option encodeEmails
  ...
Reading data from stdin...
ERROR: Could not read from stdin, reason: The "buffer" argument must be one of type Buffer,   TypedArray, or DataView. Received type number
Run 'showdown <command> -h' for help

under Ubuntu 16.04 (4.4.0-134-generic) running node 10.10.0, showdown 1.8.6.
The problem seems to lie in the file showdown/src/cli/makehtml.cmd.js, where readFromStdIn
calls fs.readSync:

  function readFromStdIn () {
    try {
      var size = fs.fstatSync(process.stdin.fd).size;
      return size > 0 ? fs.readSync(process.stdin.fd, size)[0] : '';
    } catch (e) {
      var err = new Error('Could not read from stdin, reason: ' + e.message);
      messenger.errorExit(err);
    }
  }

According to the nodejs web site, the readSync interface is: fs.readSync(fd, buffer, offset, length, position). (Perhaps it's changed since the code was first written?) I've used the following code successfully, though it ignores issues of character encoding and such. (You can't really convert bytes to a string without a character encoding, if only in the form of an assumption. :-):

  function readFromStdIn () {
    try {
      var size = fs.fstatSync(process.stdin.fd).size;
      var rslt = '';
      if (size > 0) {
         var buf = new Buffer.alloc(size);
         fs.readSync(process.stdin.fd, buf, 0, size, 0);
         rslt = buf.toString();
      }
      return rslt;
    } catch (e) {
      var err = new Error('Could not read from stdin, reason: ' + e.message);
      messenger.errorExit(err);
    }
  }

Hope this helps. I use showdown regularly (among other things, it generates previews for markdown code in my emacs environment) and I greatly appreciate your efforts in developing it and your willingness to share it. Feel free to contact me if you need any further info.

-- Ray Ellis ([email protected])

[tivie]

Thanks for you contribution. The CLI tool is, in fact, undertested, as I haven't had the time to implement proper unit testing for them.