Gulp: Read content from disk to insert into a template

Question

I want to read in a template, then read in zero or more files that contain content to inject into the template. The template and content are all in Markdown. From a small amount of reasearch it looks like Swig will provide a lightweight markup that I can use

The resulting function will look something like this:

function assembleCharacterDocument(slug) {
  return gulp.src('./templates/character-document.md')
    .pipe(files2obj(['characters/'+slug+'/*.md'])) // read content for the character
    .pipe(swig()) // == require('gulp-swig'); inject content into template 
    .pipe(md2pdf()) // convert Markdown to PDF - outside scope of this question
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./products/characters/'+slug+'.pdf'));
});

Since Swig takes a plain-old object for its replacement data, I want each file that comes in to have its filename as its key in the object. So, for example, my replacement data object will look something like this:

{
  "bio": content of characters/{slug}/bio.md,
  "profile": content of characters/{slug}/profile.md,
  "timeline": content of characters/{slug}/timeline.md,
  etc.
}

What is the content of files2obj()?

Answer 1

I ended up forgoing Gulp piping and just used the fs filesystem methods directly to fulfill my task. (Dependencies omitted for brevity.)

var templatePath = './templates/character-document.md';
var sourcePath = path.join("characters",charSlug);
var targetCombinedMarkdownPath = path.join('products',charSlug+'.md');

fs.readdir(sourcePath,function (err, files) {

  if (err) { throw err; }

  var data = {};
  files.forEach(function(f) {
    var check = /^(.*).md$/.exec(f);
    if (check) {
      data[check[1]] = fs.readFileSync(path.join(sourcePath,f),'utf8');
    }
  });

  var engine = swig.compileFile(templatePath);
  var combined = engine(data);

  fs.writeFileSync(targetCombinedMarkdownPath, combined);

  md2pdf({
    title: data.name || "CHARACTER NAME MISSING",
    source: [targetCombinedMarkdownPath],
    targetFilename: charSlug
  });

});