[Moin-user] Hints to modify parser for emphasis markup (Bold, Italic)

[Daniel Cox]

Moin Moin looks great, however the main struggle I am having with most Wiki software is the markup.

My non-technical users have been using *bold* in email for years - and we have many TWiki documents in that format. The fact that '''lots of quotes''' has almost become standard is not enough to convice users. *bold* even works in MS Word!

HTML Markup as provided by some Wiki's is definately not an option. <b>bold</b> is much harder for users to understand.

I am new to Python, could you please provide some hints on how I could modify the default parser to accept: *bold* and _italic_ - there is an extension listed, the BizarreStructuredText which would do this but it is not available for download.

The 2 expressions that handle this in TWiki are:

# PTh 25 Sep 2000: More relaxed rules, allow leading '(' and trailing ',.;:!?)'
s/([\s\(])\*([^\s]+?|[^\s].*?[^\s])\*([\s\,\.\;\:\!\?\)])/$1<strong>$2<\/strong>$3/g;
s/([\s\(])_([^\s]+?|[^\s].*?[^\s])_([\s\,\.\;\:\!\?\)])/$1<em>$2<\/em>$3/g;

It should be simple to add an expression like this to the long list in the default parser.

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.
Daniel.