Hi everyone !

I’m in need for some assistance for string manipulation with sed and regex. I tried a whole day to trial & error and look around the web to find a solution however it’s way over my capabilities and maybe here are some sed/regex gurus who are willing to give me a helping hand !

With everything I gathered around the web, It seems it’s rather a complicated regex and sed substitution, here we go !

What Am I trying to achieve?

I have a lot of markdown guides I want to host on a self-hosted forgejo based git markdown. However the classic markdown links are not the same as one github/forgejo…

Convert the following string:

[Some text](#Header%20Linking%20MARKDOWN.md)

Into

[Some text](#header-linking-markdown.md)

As you can see those are the following requirement:

  • Pattern: [Some text](#link%20to%20header.md)
  • Only edit what’s between parentheses
  • Replace space (%20) with -
  • Everything as lowercase
  • Links are sometimes in nested parentheses
    • e.g. (look here [Some text](#link%20to%20header.md))
  • Do not change a line that begins with https (external links)

While everything is probably a bit complex as a whole the trickiest part is probably the nested parentheses :/

What I tried

The furthest I got was the following:

sed -Ei 's|\(([^\)]+)\)|\L&|g' test3.md #make everything between parentheses lowercase

sed -i '/https/ ! s/%20/-/g' test3.md #change every %20 occurrence to -

These sed/regx substitution are what I put together while roaming the web, but it has a lot a flaws and doesn’t work with nested parentheses. Also this would change every %20 occurrence in the file.

The closest solution I found on stackoverflow looks similar but wasn’t able to fit to my needs. Actually my lack of regex/sed understanding makes it impossible to adapt to my requirements.

I would appreciate any help even if a change of tool is needed, however I’m more into a learning processes, so a script or CLI alternative is very appreciated :) actually any help is appreciated :D !

Thanks in advance.

  • bizdelnickEnglish
    4·
    12 hours ago

    As I see, you’ve already got an answer how to convert text to lower case. So I just tell you how to replace all occurrences of %20 with -. You need to repeat substitution until no matches found. For such iteration you need to use branching to label. Below is sed script with comments.

    :subst                                         # label
s/(\[[^]]+\]\([^)#]*#[^)]*)%20([^)]*\))/\1-\2/ # replace the first occurrence of `%20` in the URL fragment
t subst                                        # go to the `subst` label if the substitution took place

    However there are some cases when this script will fail, e. g. if there is an escaped ] character in the link text. You cannot avoid such mistakes using only simple regexps, you need a full featured markdown parser for this.

    • bizdelnick
      2·
      1 day ago

      NB: global substitution s///g is not applicable here because you need to perform new substitutions in a substituted text. Both sed regexp syntaxes (basic and extended) don’t support lookarounds that could solve this issue.