Markdown is a great tool for formatting plain text into pretty html, but it doesn't turn plain-text links into URLs automatically. Like this one:
http://www.google.com/
How do I get markdown to add tags to URLs when I format a block of text?
Markdown is a great tool for formatting plain text into pretty html, but it doesn't turn plain-text links into URLs automatically. Like this one:
http://www.google.com/
How do I get markdown to add tags to URLs when I format a block of text?
I couldn't get superjoe30's regular expression to compile, so I adapted his solution to convert plain URLs (within Markdown text) to be Markdown compatible.
The modified filter:
urlfinder = re.compile('^(http:\/\/\S+)')
urlfinder2 = re.compile('\s(http:\/\/\S+)')
@register.filter('urlify_markdown')
def urlify_markdown(value):
value = urlfinder.sub(r'<\1>', value)
return urlfinder2.sub(r' <\1>', value)
Within the template:
<div>
{{ content|urlify_markdown|markdown}}
</div>
You could write an extension to markdown. Save this code as mdx_autolink.py
import markdown
from markdown.inlinepatterns import Pattern
EXTRA_AUTOLINK_RE = r'(?<!"|>)((https?://|www)[-\w./#?%=&]+)'
class AutoLinkPattern(Pattern):
def handleMatch(self, m):
el = markdown.etree.Element('a')
if m.group(2).startswith('http'):
href = m.group(2)
else:
href = 'http://%s' % m.group(2)
el.set('href', href)
el.text = m.group(2)
return el
class AutoLinkExtension(markdown.Extension):
"""
There's already an inline pattern called autolink which handles
<http://www.google.com> type links. So lets call this extra_autolink
"""
def extendMarkdown(self, md, md_globals):
md.inlinePatterns.add('extra_autolink',
AutoLinkPattern(EXTRA_AUTOLINK_RE, self), '<automail')
def makeExtension(configs=[]):
return AutoLinkExtension(configs=configs)
Then use it in your template like this:
{% load markdown %}
(( content|markdown:'autolink'))
Update:
I've found an issue with this solution: When markdown's standard link syntax is used and the displayed portion matches the regular expression, eg:
[www.google.com](http://www.yahoo.co.uk)
strangely becomes: www.google.com
But who'd want to do that anyway?!
Best case scenario, edit the markdown and just put < > around the URLs. This will make the link clickable. Only problem is it requires educating your users, or whoever writes the markdown.
This isn't a feature of Markdown -- what you should do is run a post-processor against the text looking for a URL-like pattern. There's a good example in the Google app engine example code -- see the AutoLink
transform.
I was using the Django framework, which has a filter called urlize, which does exactly what I wanted. However, it only works on plain text, so I couldn't pass is through the output of markdown. I followed this guide to create a custom filter called urlify2 which works on html, and passed the text through this filter:
<div class="news_post">
{% autoescape off %}
{{ post.content|markdown|urlify2}}
{% endautoescape %}
</div>
The urlify2.py filter:
from django import template
import re
register = template.Library()
urlfinder = re.compile("([0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}\\.[0-9]{1,3}|((news|telnet|nttp|file|http|ftp|https)://)|(www|ftp)[-A-Za-z0-9]*\\.)[-A-Za-z0-9\\.]+):[0-9]*)?/[-A-Za-z0-9_\\$\\.\\+\\!\\*\\(\\),;:@&=\\?/~\\#\\%]*[^]'\\.}>\\),\\\"]")
@register.filter("urlify2")
def urlify2(value):
return urlfinder.sub(r'<a href="\1">\1</a>', value)
There's an extra for this in python-markdown2:
http://code.google.com/p/python-markdown2/wiki/LinkPatterns
I know this question is almost a decade old, but markdown-urlize covers every possible use case I could think of including not requiring http(s):// before a url, leaving the parenthesis in (google.com)
, removing the angle brackets from <google.com>
, ignoring urls in code blocks, and more I hadn't thought of:
https://github.com/r0wb0t/markdown-urlize
There's no pip install, but you can wget this:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r0wb0t/markdown-urlize/master/mdx_urlize.py
and then either put the above file on the python path (first option) or not (second option) and then use one of the following:
markdown.markdown(text, extensions=['urlize'], safe_mode=True)
markdown.markdown(text, extensions=['path.to.mdx_urlize'], safe_mode=True)