Transforming comments

When a comments get created, the package can transform that comment for you. This can be handy when you're allowing the user to use markdown to render comments, but you want to display them as HTML.

A comment can be created like this:

$blogPost->comment('Everybody saw the sunshine');

The text passed to comment used as the value of the original_text attribute of the Comment model.

In the comments config, you can specify comment transformer classes that can transform the comment. The transformed comment will be put in the text attribute of the Comment model. If you're building a UI, you should use text to display the comment, and the original_text when the user is editing the comment.

##Transforming Markdown to HTML

The package ships with a transformer Spatie\Comments\CommentProcessors\MarkdownToHtmlProcessor that can transform markdown to HTML. Any code snippets will be highlighted too.

To use this transformer you should install the spatie/laravel-markdown package.

composer require spatie/laravel-markdown

Make sure to install Shiki as well, this is mentioned in the installation instruction of laravel-markdown.

Next, specify the MarkdownToHtmlProcessor::class in the transformers key of the comments config file.

// in `config/comments.php`

'comment_transformers' => [
    Spatie\Comments\CommentProcessors\MarkdownToHtmlProcessor::class,
],

After that, when you create a comment like this...

$blogPost->comment('## Title')

... will create a new Comment model with these attributes:

• original_text: '## Title'
• text: <h2 id="my-title">My title</h2>

##Creating your own transformer class

You can create a transformer by letting any class implement the Spatie\Comments\CommentTransformers\CommentTransformer interface.

Here's how that interface looks like:

namespace Spatie\Comments\CommentTransformers;

use Spatie\Comments\Models\Comment;

interface CommentTransformer
{
    public function handle(Comment $comment): void;
}

Inside the handle method you should set the text property of the given $comment.

For an example, take a look at the sourcecode of MarkdownToHtmlProcessor.