Handy little regular expression to parse links from markdown files.
Links in markdown look like this:
[View the analytics docs](https://getanalytics.io/)To parse .md links programmatically with a regular expression use this pattern:
/* Match only links that are fully qualified with https */
const fullLinkOnlyRegex = /^\[([\w\s\d]+)\]\((https?:\/\/[\w\d./?=#]+)\)$/
/* Match full links and relative paths */
const regex = /^\[([\w\s\d]+)\]\(((?:\/|https?:\/\/)[\w\d./?=#]+)\)$/
const string = "[View the analytics docs](https://getanalytics.io/)"
const myMatch = string.match(regex)
console.log(myMatch)
/* ["[View the analytics docs](https://getanalytics.io/)", "View the analytics docs", "https://getanalytics.io/", index: 0, input: "[View the analytics docs](https://getanalytics.io/)", groups: undefined] */
// de-structure the array
const [ full, text, url ] = myMatch
console.log(text)
// 'View the analytics docs'
console.log(url)
// 'https://getanalytics.io/'See the demo on regex101
Parsing all links out of file
To grab all the links of of a file, you can use this:
const regexMdLinks = /\[([^\[]+)\](\(.*\))/gm
// Example md file contents
const mdContents = `
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit..
[hello link](/admin/table_edit/table_edit.cfm?action=edit&table_name=organizationsXcategories)
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit..
[otherLink](https://google.com)
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit..
[third link](https://google.com)
`
const matches = mdContents.match(regexMdLinks)
console.log('links', matches)
const singleMatch = /\[([^\[]+)\]\((.*)\)/
for (var i = 0; i < matches.length; i++) {
var text = singleMatch.exec(matches[i])
console.log(`Match #${i}:`, text)
console.log(`Word #${i}: ${text[1]}`)
console.log(`Link #${i}: ${text[2]}`)
}Comment below if you have any questions or updates to this snippet!