Converts standard Markdown inline links to lazy links.

inline-to-lazy.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

# Converts standard Markdown inline links to lazy links.

# Serving Suggestions: Pipe text into inline-to-lazy.pl
# from the command line or install as a BBEdit Text Filter.
 
# 2014 Josh Centers. http://joshcenters.com/

my $text;							# Our hero, the $text variable. 
local $/;							# Grab all the text.
$text = <>;							# Assign STDIN to our hero.

$text = $text . "\n";

$text =~ s/\[(.*?)\]/\[$1\]\[\*\]/g; # replace [text] with [text][*]

# Now we're going to split our $text at the start of each new line,
# turning our $text into a list of text lines, then iterate through
# each one, so we can easily put the linked URLs at the end of each
# line.

foreach my $line (split /^/, $text) {

	if ($line =~ m/\]\(/) {                                 # Check to see if there's even an inline Markdown URL on the line. Without this, the script outputs way too many newlines.
	
		my @url_list = ($line =~ m/(\(http.*?\))/g);    # Find URLs in parentheses assign them to the array @URL_list.

		$line =~ s/(\(http.*?\))//g;                    # Now that the URLs are safely stashed away, delete them.
	
		foreach my $url (@url_list) {                   # For each URL in the URL_list…
			$url = "[*]: " . $url; # …prepend [*]:  to each URL
			$url =~ s/\(//; # …delete (…
			$url =~ s/\)//; # …and delete ).
		}
	
		print "$line\n"; #print the line, followed by a newline
		print join("\n", @url_list); #print each URL in the @url_list, with a newline before the list
		print "\n";
	} 

	else {print $line;} # If there's no inline Markdown URLs, just print the line as is.

}