How do I get python-markdown to additionally "urlify" links when formatting plain text?

django, markdown, python

Solution

I couldn't get superjoe30's regular expression to compile, so I adapted his solution to convert plain URLs (within Markdown text) to be Markdown compatible.

The modified filter:

urlfinder = re.compile('^(http:\/\/\S+)')
urlfinder2 = re.compile('\s(http:\/\/\S+)')
@register.filter('urlify_markdown')
def urlify_markdown(value):
    value = urlfinder.sub(r'<\1>', value)
    return urlfinder2.sub(r' <\1>', value)

Within the template:

<div>
    {{ content|urlify_markdown|markdown}}
</div>

Problem

Markdown is a great tool for formatting plain text into pretty html, but it doesn't turn plain-text links into URLs automatically. Like this one: http://www.google.com/ How do I get markdown to add tags to URLs when I format a block of text?

Original source