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I have something like this;

I like reading **books** and taking **notes**

I was trying to get something like this;

I like reading <b>books</b> and taking <b>notes</b>

Tried doing;

sed 's/\*\*\(.*\)\*\*/<b>\1<\/b>/g' a.txt

This returns;

I like reading <b>books** and taking **notes</b>

It wraps around the whole line. Any way to get around it?

note: I'm using a GNU version of sed

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  • There are many existing tools to convert markdown to html, including markdown and mmark and markdown_py. and, of course, pandoc. They each have their own quirks and pros and cons, but using any of them is better than wasting time re-inventing the wheel. Commented Apr 17, 2021 at 3:01
  • @cas appreciate the suggestion. I'm pretty new to regex and thought markdown to html conversion using regex would be a good way to get started. I'm having fun. Commented Apr 18, 2021 at 14:20

1 Answer 1

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You can do the following with GNU sed:

$ sed 's:\*\*\([^*]*\)\*\*:<b>\1</b>:g' a.txt I like reading <b>books</b> and taking <b>notes</b>

The \*\*\([^*]*\)\*\* pattern captures the string that is between **...** that is not a wildcard *. Finally you replace the captured group for itself between the tags.

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  • Brilliant!!!!!! Commented Apr 16, 2021 at 16:53

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