Question

I’m trying to create a custom syntax for my users to format some html

so a user can enter something like:

**some text here**
the some more text down here
**Another bunch of stuff**
then some other junk

and I get:

<h1>some text here</h2>
<p>the some more text down here</p>
<h1>Another bunch of stuff</h1>
<p>then some other junk</p>

and hopefully leave some room to make up other tags as I need them

edit:
So my question is how would I write the regex function to convert some given text and have it find every instance of an opening and closing ** and replace them with the appropriate or tags.
i have:
import re

header_pattern = re.compile(r'(?P**)(?P.*)(?P**)’, re.MULTILINE)

def format_headers(text):
    def process_match(m):
        return "<h2>%s</h2>" % m.group('header')

    new_text = header_pattern.sub(process_match, text)

    print new_text

but this only grabs the first ** and last ** and ignores ones in the middle.

Answer 1

Use some standard solution. Like Markdown. Its is most preferable.

To match your header strings use r'\*\*(.*?)\*\*'. See example

>>> re.sub(r'\*\*(.*?)\*\*','<h1>\\1</h1>', '**some text here** and **another**')
'<h1>some text here</h1> and <h1>another</h1>'