Can someone give me a regex to read from a string matches of character and give me the result of what's between them? Ie. The string holds "Hi there *mom* and *dad*". The regex would search for the patter *...stuff...* and will return what it finds inside (in this example, mom and dad would have to be stored and automatically instructed to be bolded. The purpose of this is, I want people to be able to have more control over their text in my perl program, I want to give them the ability to italicize and bold text (without using the real HTML codes).
I know this is a mess to read. Basically I want it to see if * something * exists and if it does, convert everything between a pair of characters to whatever I want (make it bold, italics, make it into a link, etc).