I'm not new to Python but a complete newbie with regular expressions (on my to do list)
I am trying to use python re to convert a string such as
[Hollywood Holt](http://www.hollywoodholt.com)
to
<a href="http://www.hollywoodholt.com">Hollywood Holt</a>
and a string like
*Hello world*
to
<strong>Hello world</strong>
Why are you bothering to use a regex? Your content is Markdown, why not simply take the string and run it through the markdown module?
First, make sure Markdown is installed. It has a dependancy on ElementTree so easy_install the two of them as follows. If you're running Windows, you can use the Windows installer instead.
easy_install ElementTree
easy_install Markdown
To use the Markdown module and convert your string to html simply do the following (tripple quotes are used for literal strings):
import markdown
markdown_text = """[Hollywood Holt](http://www.hollywoodholt.com)"""
html = markdown.markdown(markdown_text)
