Help with regex

PHP
1

Regexes tend to fry my brain! I’m looking for a regex to translate a Markdown link into an HTML anchor tag. eg.

[I'm an inline-style link](http://www.domain.com)

into

<a href="http://www.domain.com">I'm an inline-style link</a>

Can anyone help please? Thanks

2

How particular do you want to be regarding the link? Do you care if it is properly formatted?

/\[(.*)\]\((.*)\)/g is the dead simple way, it will give you two groups, one that matches what is in the [] and one that matches what is in the ()

1 Like
3

Thanks @cpradio. Dead simple suits me in more ways than one :smiley: I guess I need something along the lines of this to effect the translation, but which bits do I need to quote and which bits to escape???

$html = preg_replace("/\[(.*)\]\((.*)\)/g", "<a href="$2">$1</a>", $markdown)
4

What you have looks right to me.

5

Here is what I threw together, and it seems to work.

<?php
$markdown = "[I'm an inline-style link](http://www.domain.com)";
$html = preg_replace("/\[(.*)\]\((.*)\)/", "<a href=\"$2\">$1</a>", $markdown);
var_dump($html);
1 Like
6

Brill, thanks @cpradio. I shoulda noticed the need to escape the double quotes!

7

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