Excerpt from gitolite doc/Markdown.pl

Markdown.pl

#
# Globals:
#

# Regex to match balanced [brackets]. See Friedl's
# "Mastering Regular Expressions", 2nd Ed., pp. 328-331.
my $g_nested_brackets;
$g_nested_brackets = qr{
	(?> 								# Atomic matching
	   [^\[\]]+							# Anything other than brackets
	 | 
	   \[
		 (??{ $g_nested_brackets })		# Recursive set of nested brackets
	   \]
	)*
}x;


# Table of hash values for escaped characters:
my %g_escape_table;
foreach my $char (split //, '\\`*_{}[]()>#+-.!') {
	$g_escape_table{$char} = md5_hex($char);
}


# Global hashes, used by various utility routines
my %g_urls;
my %g_titles;
my %g_html_blocks;

# Used to track when we're inside an ordered or unordered list
# (see _ProcessListItems() for details):
my $g_list_level = 0;


#### Blosxom plug-in interface ##########################################

# Set $g_blosxom_use_meta to 1 to use Blosxom's meta plug-in to determine
# which posts Markdown should process, using a "meta-markup: markdown"
# header. If it's set to 0 (the default), Markdown will process all
# entries.
my $g_blosxom_use_meta = 0;

sub start { 1; }
sub story {
	my($pkg, $path, $filename, $story_ref, $title_ref, $body_ref) = @_;

	if ( (! $g_blosxom_use_meta) or
	     (defined($meta::markup) and ($meta::markup =~ /^\s*markdown\s*$/i))
	     ){
			$$body_ref  = Markdown($$body_ref);
     }
     1;
}