Is there a way to force conversion of underscores to asterisks?

1

I have a bad habit of using both _ and * in my markdown. Some people I work with would like consistency. I’ve already edited: Markdown Emphasis so when I use CMD+I, I will get the asterisk. Now I’m wondering about a Markdown lint or better forced conversion.

2

There are some linting solutions out there for Markdown. I admit I’ve never taken a look at them or seen anyone specifically adapt one to Drafts, but it’s likely possible to do.

That said, some other lightweight options might serve your needs.

If you are only worried about the case of italics, you could use regular expression replacements to look for cases of underscore italics and replace them with asterisks.

You could also get sort of a lightweight linter by passing Draft content through Drafts’ Markdown parser to convert it to HTML, then back through the HTML to Markdown converter to turn it back into Markdown with a script like (this version updates the text in the editor):

let md = new MultiMarkdown()
let html2md = new HTMLToMarkdown()

let html = md.render(editor.getText())
let markdown = html2md.process(html)

editor.setText(markdown)

This would get you back Markdown that matched the rules applied in your HTML to Markdown settings.

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3

You could also create a text replacement in iOS / macOS settings to always replace__ with ** if that doesn’t interfere with other workflows of your own :wink:?

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4

Since single _ gets used in real life outside of Markdown that might result in awkward changes to my writing.

5

That’s for sure yes :wink:
Maybe it was not the best example :wink: but depending on what you use as „shortcut“ for the replacement, you could fix it on a „writing level“ instead of an action that you need to run. Depends on what you want to achieve but the solution above might suit you better :wink:

6

This one-liner in an action would probably would get you close:

editor.setText(editor.getText().replace(/(?<=\s)_([^_\n]+)_(?=[\s\?\.\!])/gm, "*$1*"))

The regex looks for any _ style italics and replaces the _ with a *. The pattern only matches if the underscores are surrounded by whitespace or immediately followed by a period, question mark or exclaimation point.

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7

This is the way. I bow to your Regex skills.

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