Matching Bold Text

To match bold text in Markdown, we need to identify and extract text between two asterisks ** or two underscores __ at the beginning and end of the content. We can achieve this by using the following Java regular expression:

String markdownText = "This is **bold text** and __another bold text__.";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(?<=\\*\\*|__)(.*?)(?=\\*\\*|__)");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(markdownText);

while (matcher.find()) {
    String boldText = matcher.group();
    System.out.println(boldText);
}

The output of this code will be:

bold text
another bold text

Matching Italic Text

Markdown represents italic text using one asterisk * or one underscore _ at the beginning and end of the content. To extract italic text, we can use the following Java regular expression:

String markdownText = "This is *italic text* and _another italic text_.";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(?<=\\*|_)(.*?)(?=\\*|_)");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(markdownText);

while (matcher.find()) {
    String italicText = matcher.group();
    System.out.println(italicText);
}

The output of this code will be:

italic text
another italic text

These are just a few examples of how to match specific Markdown format patterns using Java regular expressions. You can easily extend these patterns to match other Markdown elements like headers, links, or lists. Regular expressions are a powerful tool for parsing and manipulating text, and when combined with Markdown, they can offer even more flexibility in processing your content.

#regex #markdown