Re: [Python-markdown-discuss] Limitations of inlinePatterns

[Yuri T. <qar...@gm...>]

>  The easy solution is to reverse the order of the inlinePatterns. But
>  then we can't do the first example as the link syntax is broken up in
>  the same way. Now, if no one ever uses that syntax, that would be
>  fine. Of course, both should work, so we may need a new approach to
>  the inlinePatterns. Any ideas?


I've thought about this issue before and I think there are basically
two solutions (apart from the zeroth solution of just dealing with
it).  One, somewhat tricky, would be implement some kind of data
structure contains a mixture of strings and dom nodes and works with
RE.  It's not impossible, and I got half-way there implementing it in
2006, but then didn't have time to finish.  What I tried at the time
was storing a sting which uses a special Unicode character to mark the
positions where the nodes are supposed to be included.  I.e., if "⊙"
is the special character, we could store something like:

    ["A **⊙**  currently does not work.", <link>]

This would allow us to run REs (if we are careful) and still get the
dom tree in the end.

Another possibility is to only use dom trees for high-level elements
(lists, code blocks, quotes, etc), and do reduce inline patterns to
simple REs (each run on one element of the larger tree at a time).

The second solution would break some old extensions, but I think it's
overall simpler and better.  To give credit where credit is due, this
is basically Ben Wilson's suggestion from last summer:

https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=cc6097050704100456x4daa81f0i9ca0137b6c484ba4%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=python-markdown-discuss

I don't have time at the moment for such a major overhaul (this would
basically be Python-Markdown 2.0), but if someone else does then I
think this is the way to go.  I am also pretty sure that this would
give us a sizeable performance boost.

  - yuri