Trouble with parentheses in Markdown hyperlinks

[Fletcher Penney]

Markdown.pl (the original implementation by John Gruber) is basically abandonware at this point, as it as not been updated in years.  In fact, as has been pointed out on this list, Gruber has not commented on this discussion group in years.

That said, Markdown the *syntax*, is certainly alive and well in the form of multiple descendant projects.

In fact, your example file below works just fine with MultiMarkdown, and presumably with peg-markdown (since I built MMD version 3 around John MacFarlane's peg-markdown implementation.)

Not sure what implementation Stack Overflow is actually using, but clearly some implementations work just fine in this regard.  Many (most?) modern implementations also have vastly improved performance over the original perl version for most documents (often by several orders of magnitude).  If they are using Markdown.pl, perhaps it is time that they upgrade....  If not, simply speak with the developer of the actual implementation that is being used.


Fletcher



On Oct 17, 2012, at 8:50 PM, Andrew Pennebaker wrote:


> How can we improve URL detection in Markdown? I posted a question on Stack Overflow and happened to click a URL in my post. To my surprise, it wasn't functional, and it took three different, nonintuitive manipulations before I achieved a functional URL. Stack Overflow says "not my problem", so I'm deferring to Markdown itself.

> 

> Here's a sample Markdown document on Gist. All but the final hyperlink fail to be functional. You can verify this behavior in Dingus. I'd paste my sample directly in Gmail, but it would actually fix the URLs and obscure the problem.

> 

> I believe this is easily fixed by altering the regex responsible for parsing [name](url)  syntax to be lazy rather than eager.

> 

> -- 

> Cheers,

> 

> Andrew Pennebaker

> www.yellosoft.us



-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net 

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