How to convert dokuwiki links into markdown using regex

Horst JENS — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 20:00:20 GMT

While I was always aware of the fact that regular expressions (regex) are a very powerful search-and-replace tool, I hardly ever used them in practice. For my humble needs, the built-in search-and-replace tool of my favorite text editor Geany is more than sufficient. From time to time, when I run into complex cases, I usually write a small Python script.

This morning, while converting old Dokuwiki-shownotes pages from my podcast into markdown format, I finally gave in: I wanted to solve a task using regular expressions.

The task was already solved inside a larger hand-written python script of mine, but I thought it would be nice to have a singular regex string that I can copy/paste into the search-replace dialog of Geany.

The task is this one:

convert a hyperlink from dokuwiki's format into markdown format.

example:

source: (dokuwiki format) [[https://geany.org|Geany text editor]]

desired result (markdown format): [Geany text editor](https://geany.org)

Spielend programmieren (Posts about markdown)

How to convert dokuwiki links into markdown using regex