How to match plain text URL in a markdown? - regex

Question

I'm currently trying to match all plain text links in a markdown text.
Example of the markdown text:
Dude, look at this url http://www.google.com .. it's a great search engine
I would like it to be converted into
Dude, look at this url <http://www.google.com> .. it's a great search engine
So in short, processing url should become <url>, but processing existing <url> shouldnt become <<url>>. Also, the link in the markdown can be in the form of (url), so we'll have to avoid matching the normal brackets too.
So my working regex for matching the plain text url in java is :
"[^(\\<|\\(](https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&##/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&##/%=~_|][^(\\>|\\)]",
with [^(\\<|\\(] and [^(\\>|\\)] to avoid matching the wrapping brackets.
But here lies one problem where i also do not want to match this kind of url :
[1]: http://slashdot.org
So, if the markdown text is
Dude, look at this url http://www.google.com .. it's a great search engine
[1]: http://slashdot.org
I want only http://www.google.com to be matched, but not the http://slashdot.org.
I wonder what's the pattern to meet this criteria ?

Answer 1

What you have here is a parsing problem. Regexes are fine, but just using regexes here will make it a mess (supposing you achieve it). After you fix this problem, you'll probably find yourself facing other ones, like URL in code (between ` or in lines starting with tabs or four spaces) that you don't want to replace.
A solution would be to split into lines and then
detect patterns (for example ^\[\d+\]:\s+)
apply your replacements (for example this URL to link change) only on lines which doesn't follow an incompatible pattern
That's the logic I use in this small pseudo-markdown parser that you can test here.
Note that there's always the solution to use an existing proved markdown parser, there are many of them.