Python regular expression with wiki text

Question

I'm trying to change wikitext into normal text using Python regular expressions substitution. There are two formatting rules regarding wiki link.

• [[Name of page]]

• [[Name of page | Text to display]]

  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet)

Here is some text that gives me a headache.

The CD is composed almost entirely of [[cover version]]s of [[The Beatles]] songs which George Martin [[record producer|produced]] originally.

The text above should be changed into:

The CD is composed almost entirely of cover versions of The Beatles songs which George Martin produced originally.

The conflict between [[ ]] and [[ | ]] grammar is my main problem. I don't need one complex regular expression. Applying multiple (maybe two) regular expression substitution(s) in sequence is ok.

Please enlighten me on this problem.

Answer 1

wikilink_rx = re.compile(r'\[\[(?:[^|\]]*\|)?([^\]]+)\]\]')
return wikilink_rx.sub(r'\1', the_string)

Example: http://ideone.com/7oxuz

Note: you may also find some MediaWiki parsers in http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers.