A problem with your regex, as it stands : you need to escape some of those square brackets, as those have special meaning within regexes.

Monolith-O, the syntax you're using is so close to HTML as it is that it doesn't seem to simplify things much. If you can change it, consider doing so. you could do something like what perlmonks does, and let [www.foo.com|the Foo site] stand in for <a href="http://www.foo.com">the Foo site</a>. A regex to match that would be:

$text =~ s#(\[([^|])+\|([^\]]+)]#<a href="http://$1">$2</a>#g;
[download]

Update that's wrong, as $code_or_die points out.

Sticking with the current setup, the first regex should be something like this (untested):

$text =~ s#\[link=(["'])(\S+)\1]([^[])+\[/link]#<a href="$2">$3</a>#g;
[download]

This says "when you find "link=" followed by a single or double quote, grab 1 or more characters that aren't a single or double quote (whichever matched) -- store that in $2 -- followed by the single or double quote, then grab one or more characters that aren't [ and store them in $3, finished up by [/link]. Replace that whole sequence with <a href="$2">$3</a>

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

Your perlmonks-style regex didn't seem to work when I tried it. I think that the first half of it was matching the wrong thing. However this worked for me:



$text =~  s#\[([^\|]+)\|([^\]]+)\]#<a href="http://$1">$2</a>#g;
[download]

I also cleaned it up to allow people to put "http://" at the beginning of the URL (i.e. if they copy and paste a link):

$Details =~  s#\[(http://)?([^\|]+)\|([^\]]+)\]#<a href="http://$2">$3
+</a>#g;
[download]

You're right. One problem is that opening paren, which doesn't have a match; another one is that I mistyped ")+" instead of "+) -- otherwise we capture one or more character next to a pipe ... that oughta learn me =)

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

I'm mainly looking for flexability rather than simplicity right now as I am getting used to the general code and syntax.