white-matter

white-matter is a minimal YAML front matter parser and an alternative to gray-matter.

Unlike gray-matter, it does not throw when js-yaml encounters invalid YAML. Instead, it returns the Markdown content as usual and sets data to an empty object.

This is useful when processing should continue even if the front matter is invalid, for example in Markdown editor plugins.

data is always an object. It is empty when the input has no front matter, the front matter is empty or invalid, or the parsed YAML document is not a mapping.

Installation

npm install white-matter

Usage

The basic usage is the same as gray-matter, but it currently has no advanced options.

import matter from 'white-matter';

console.log(matter('---\ntitle: Front Matter\n---\nThis is content.'));

// -> { content: 'This is content.', data: { title: 'Front Matter' } }

By default, white-matter does not cache parse results. You can enable a simple built-in cache for repeated identical inputs.

import matter from 'white-matter';

console.log(matter('---\ntitle: Front Matter\n---\nThis is content.', { cache: true }));

Call matter.clearCache() to reset it.

Benchmark

Run the benchmark with:

npm run benchmark

The benchmark reports two separate scenarios:

• Cold parse: unique input with white-matter cache disabled, for parser-to-parser comparison
• Warm parse: identical input with white-matter cache enabled, for repeated parse workloads

Example output:

Cold parse (unique input, cache disabled)
gray-matter x 434,280 ops/sec ±0.17% (101 runs sampled)
white-matter x 754,335 ops/sec ±0.14% (99 runs sampled)
Fastest is white-matter

Warm parse (identical input, cache enabled)
gray-matter x 1,902,103 ops/sec ±0.84% (98 runs sampled)
white-matter x 104,284,156 ops/sec ±3.14% (89 runs sampled)
Fastest is white-matter

License

MIT