>Tidy Up with Regex

Something had been bugging me for a while; I had a legacy shortcode that would render external links, when really I wanted to use markdown to improve portability. Hundreds of instances lurked within dozens of markdown files, waiting for the day where I update my site and they all break.

I’ve also changed my position on external links. I want to let the user and browser decide on how links should behave. It’s none of my business what you prefer, so have at it.

Turns out, it was a relatively straight forward process. Using VS Code, I used the following find and replace:

Find:

\{% external-link "(.*?)", "(.*?)" %\}

Replace:

[$2]($1)

I say relatively straight forward, but really it was a lot of searching and refining. At the end of it all, the meaning of the regex has floated out of my head. I suppose that’s how it’s meant to be. It’s the same with markdown links. Circle then square, right? Or is it square then… maybe I’ll just make a shortcode.