add_new doesn't handle markdown for nested blocks

[JustinKolnick]

Description

The readme mentions that the add_new method handles markdown formatting (and it does for some markdown elements like bold and italics) but it doesn't handle markdown for other "nested" blocks

page.children.add_new(TextBlock, title='Testing 1, 2, 3...\n - Testing \n - Another \n * [ ] Heres one more')

Results in 1 block of text:

Testing 1, 2, 3...

Testing

Another
[ ] Heres one more

Ideally it should result in 4 blocks like this:

Testing 1, 2, 3...

• Testing
• Another

• Heres one more

---

I've done some testing and these are the supported/unsupported markdown lists that I can gather:

Supported Markdown

• Bold
• Italics
• Links
• Inline code (code)

Unsupported Markdown

• Todos
• Lists (bullets, ordered lists, etc.)
• Headers
• Multi-line code blocks
• Horizontal rules

---

Since TextBlock is explicitly text, the current behavior makes sense, however maybe a new Block class is a better approach to handle the unique markdown parsing. Something like:

page.children.add_new(MarkdownBlock, title='Testing 1, 2, 3...\n - Testing \n - Another \n * [ ] Heres one more')

[Cobertos]

https://github.com/Cobertos/md2notion may be of use, it will convert full Markdown documents to a descriptor for notion-py

[jamalex]

@Cobertos Awesome! Let me know if you want to look at tighter integration of md2notion into notion-py (and then I could add you as a co-maintainer). Would be nice to have a clean interface for the other direction as well (e.g. myblock.to_markdown(recurse_depth=2)).

[Cobertos]

@jamalex Hmm, possibly. I kind of like the separation tbh. Allows me to provide a CLI interface and keeps the focus of both libraries more focussed.

I also would hope Notion's Markdown importer would eventually get better so my package is unneeded and they'll just have an API endpoint you can hit to do a proper import instead x:

I've been looking at going the other way though (Notion to MD) but the surface area of Notion block types is much larger than what MD can handle. I'm more interested in Notion to HTML right now anyway (for my blog content) though from looking at kjk's Go implementation might be a pain to rewrite in Python.

[indirectlylit]

@Cobertos md2notion is great to see - nice job. I've needed that functionality in the past and will give it a try in the future.

[jamalex]

@Cobertos Sounds good. If there's anything you find yourself doing in md2notion that you think could benefit general upstream notion-py users, please do open a PR! :) I've added a link to md2notion from the README.

Yeah, markdown definitely can't handle everything. HTML could be interesting, and some sort of framework for exporting to custom HTML (templated, with customizable transformation functions for different block types) could be pretty nice. I don't think it would be particularly hard to get set up, leveraging notion-py's existing interface?

[jamalex]

I'm more interested in Notion to HTML right now anyway (for my blog content) though from looking at kjk's Go implementation might be a pain to rewrite in Python.

Took a stab at this here! Would you be able to take a peek and provide feedback? Curious whether this is the sort of thing you'd find useful.
#91