Question

I want to achieve what stack overflow does, so you can do _italics_ and *bold* and it changes it to <em>italics</em> and <strong>bold</strong>, however, I’m a beginner to regex, and i’m having a hard time writing the regex replace for this.

Thanks in advance ->
Will

Answer 1

StackOverflow uses Markdown to transform the syntax you reference (and more!) to HTML markup. You’d be wise to use this framework, or one like it, rather than rolling your own – why go to all that effort to reproduce something that works well?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

If you do decide to roll your own, use something besides regular expressions, like a state machine – regular expressions will get complicated very quickly for task of this complexity.