Dear monks,

I am doing some customization of John Gruber's Markdown, and in the process, struggling with some regex work that hopefully you can give my some guidance on.

I want to collect all the local links in my text. So, in the example below, I want only

Perl Monk
Regular Expressions
The stuff in []() is not local, and the stuff in ![] is an image, hence I don't want them. I have not succeeded in making a good regex for what I need. Here is what I have... 

my $text = "Hello, I am a [Perl Monk], still not good at 
[Regular Expressions]. I have been helped immensely 
by the good monks at [Perl Monks](http://www.perlmonks.org). 
This is what I look like ![mymugshot]. Thank you.";

sub listlink {
  my ($text) = @_;
  
  my @links = ( 
    $text =~ / 
      (?<!\!\[) # make sure the match is not preceded by a ![
      (?<=\[)   # but is in fact preceded by just a [
      .*?       # the match
      (?=\])    # followed by a ]
      (?!\()    # but not followed by a (
    /xg 
  );

  foreach my $link (@links) {
    print "$link\n";
  }
}

[download]

Update: there could be anything inside [] and it would be valid. So, we could have [Some (stuff) !Wow] and it would be valid. The only links that are not local are [link text](link)

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to regex to collect local links in Markdown by punkish

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