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How to change image URLs in a markdown string

Published May 24 2022

I was trying to see if moving my blog (based on Hugo) to Next.js was a good move (it wasn’t) and I found a problem.

Hugo allows me to use spaces in images, which is handy especially as I use screenshots and I get those named as Screen Shot 2022-... by default.

The Next.js markdown does not allow that. So I had a script that converted all images names to use hyphens instead of spaces

"Screen Shot 2022-..." 

=> 

"Screen-Shot-2022-..."

and then I replaced the post markdown content with that.

Also I had to change the URL because Hugo allows a post to be in the same folder as the markdown file, while Next.js does not.

So I used a /public/images/<SLUG>/ folder format to make each post image public.

Here’s how I did that:

import matter from 'gray-matter'

...

let { data: frontmatter, content } = matter(fileName)

const regex = /\!\[(.*?)\]\((.*?)\)/gm
let matches

while ((matches = regex.exec(content)) !== null) {
  content = content.replace(
      '](' + matches[2],
      `](/images/${slug}/${matches[2].replace(/ /g, '-').replace(/\//g, '')}`
  )
}

I also got a super cool course 👇