On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Andrew Pennebaker < andrew.penneba...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could we standardize URL-parsing regexes across Markdown implementations? > Can we come up with a really super regex and invite the various fork > developers and maintainers to use that regex? > > There are at least 3 possible problems with this: 1) This assumes that all implementations use regex. That may not necessarily be the case. For example, peg markdown is a peg parser. While I'm not sure if it uses a peg grammar or regex for matching urls (I didn't go check), why should it be required to use a regex? 2) Not all languages (perl, python, ruby, php, lua, ...) use the same regex implementation. For instance, when developing the python implementation of markdown, I have had to work around a few features of the perl regex implementation that do not exist in python. Had JG been working in a language other than perl when he first developed the markdown syntax, I suspect a few things would be different. Some subtle features of the syntax are definitely a direct result of how perl's regex works. Nothing that can't be overcome - but not always with regex (see [this][] example). [this]: https://github.com/waylan/Python-Markdown/commit/ef9a229ebeaf8173e9fd4e541de4d83e8678f649 3) Even if the above issues didn't exist, how would you be able to convince all of the implementors to use it in their implementations? Oh, and to address the original issue starting this thread, along with the others mentioned, Python-Markdown also parses the url with parenthesis correctly. I would suggest filing a bug report with whichever implementation Stack Overflow uses and hope that that implementation is still under active development. -- ---- \X/ /-\ `/ |_ /-\ |\| Waylan Limberg
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