Someone once said:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think

“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

I’m not completely sure where I stand as to the universal utility of regular expressions, but I did meet with a problem recently with the markdown parser that our team was using on a project.

The problem was that Wikipedia-style URLs weren’t getting parsed properly:

[React](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/React_(JavaScript_library))

The specific part that was misbehaving was the parentheses included with the URL. A closing parenthesis has semantic significance in markdown, so the URL was getting parsed only up to the first closing parenthesis.