My Perl Fu is weak!

I’m desperately trying to code a bit of Perl here. I’m attempting to write a template macro for MT that turns all links in posts into valid XML. But my Perl Fu isn’t strong enough.

To make a link XML valid, it mustn’t contain ampersands — “&”. They must instead be written as “&”. If not, the HTML validator complains. It’s really not a big deal, but I take personal pride in writing validating pages. I could fix any links I post manually, but I’d be very likely to forget doing it or breaking the links. Neither is an option. So I want to automate it in MT.

I’ve managed to do a quick Perl hack that does what I want — sort of. But it replaces globally, and I want to make sure that it doesn’t replace stuff outside of HTML tags — or more specifically, outside of A tags. I’m pondering how to write a regular expression for that…

Well, I have a possible solution in mind, but it does require a bit more code than the simple regular expression I was hoping for. I’ll give it a try tomorrow — need to go to bed now. If I still can’t get it to work, I’ll consult with one of the Perl Fu Masters of MT — Brad Choate and John Gruber come to mind.

Update: There’s a new MovableType plugin from John Gruber on Daring Fireball, that replaces his earlier Smart Quote educator. I’ve switched to it, let’s see if it does its mojo.