Replace markdown links with text and url

Question

My goal is to turn markdown into text. I am accomplishing this with parsing markdown into HTML using Redcarpet, and then using #strip_tags. My issue is with links, this method only preserves the text of the link and not the link itself.

Ex: I need to preserve the href url after using #strip_tags

# current
<a href="http://www.google.com">google</a> => google
# desired
<a href="http://www.google.com">google</a> => http://www.google.com google

I think the best way would be to use regex, can anyone help implementing this?

My goal is:

def contents_md

# instantiates Redcarpet
    @markdown ||= begin
        options = [autolink: true, fenced_code_blocks: true,     no_intra_emphasis: true, hard_wrap: true, filter_html: true, gh_blockcode: true]
        renderer = Redcarpet::Render::HTML.new(render_options = {})
        Redcarpet::Markdown.new(renderer, *options)
    end

# I need to run contents through a regex before passing to renderer that will turn something like this:
# [text1](https://www.stackoverflow.com) and [text2](https://www.google.com)
# into:
# text1 https://www.stackoverflow.com and text2 https://www.google.com


# then ill pass the result here, which will preserve my links that would be held in <a></a> instead of losing them 
 @markdown.render(contents)
end

# this will then be ran like:
<%= strip_tags(value.contents_md) %>

spickermann · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-15 21:30:41Z

1

You could use gsub with a regexp like this:

text = "[text1](https://www.stackoverflow.com) and [text2](https://www.google.com)"

text.gsub(/\[(.*?)\]\((.*?)\)/, "#{$1} #{$2}")
#=> "text2 https://www.google.com and text2 https://www.google.com"

answered Jan 15, 2019 at 21:30

spickermann

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