Python Regex Search And Replace

Question

I have been using Python since some time now but a complete newbie with regular expressions.

I am trying to use python re to convert a string such as

[Hollywood Holt](http://www.hollywoodholt.com)
to

<a href="http://www.hollywoodholt.com">Hollywood Holt</a>
 

and a string like

*Hello world*
to

<strong>Hello world</strong>
 

Can anyone help me? How do I do this?

Answer 1

You need not use a regex. Your content is Markdown and you can take the string and run it through the markdown module.

First, make sure Markdown is installed. It has a dependancy on ElementTree so easy_install the two of them as follows. If you're running Windows, you can use the Windows installer instead.

easy_install ElementTree
easy_install Markdown
To use the Markdown module and convert your string to html simply do the following (tripple quotes are used for literal strings):

import markdown
markdown_text = """[Hollywood Holt](http://www.hollywoodholt.com)"""
html = markdown.markdown(markdown_text)