How to Extract Markdown Reference Links from Text

Matthew Palmer December 10, 2014

Like a lot of people, I write in Markdown. Markdown has support for reference links, which look like the following:

This is a [link to something][lts] that I am sharing.
More writing...

`[lts]: http://wwww.link.com`

(The backticks are there so that the Markdown parser doesn’t think I’m trying to link to something.)

I love using links in this style, but I often forget what I’ve referenced after I’ve linked it. I’ve written a short command line to grab out the link identifiers from a Markdown post.

With the contents of your writing on the clipboard, run the following in Terminal.

pbpaste | egrep -o '\]\[[a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\]' | sed -E 's/]//' | pbcopy

Now all of the references to links will be on the clipboard, ready for you to hit Command+V to paste at the end of your blog post.

`[editor]: ...`
`[fs]: ...`
`[mp]: ...`

If you have any questions, let me know on Twitter.