That is, I suspect that //**this** wouldn't be any harder// for people to write, and in fact, quite a bit easier, and it would be *much* easier to parse. In point of fact, I suspect that on point 2 above,
if
As an experiment, I added support for // and **:
Replace:
$outtext .= $this->doQuotes ( $line ) . "\n";
with: -- $line = $this->doQuotes ($line); $line = preg_replace("///(.*?)///", "<I>$1</I>", $line); $line = preg_replace("/**(.*?)**/", "<B>$1</B>", $line); $outtext .= $line . "\n"; --
Whoever came up with '' / ''' made a *lot* of work for themselves.
Steve PS In that implementation, //mismatching **bold//and** italics seems to work ok. But the output is not correct HTML...