How to modify parser to not need to escape forward slashes?

[joekim]

I'm building a narrative around the science of sleep and breathing. I have a lot of references but it's a little annoying to need to escape all the links

Adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. # REF: https:\/\/www.sleepfoundation.org\/how-sleep-works\/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need 

How can I modify the parser to not need to escape the forward slash?

Thanks.

[joethephish]

Are you sure you need to escape all the slashes? Isn’t it just the double // after https, since that gets interpreted as a comment? If that’s the case then you should also only need to escape the second forward slash?

https:/\/www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need

[joekim]

Oh, I didn't know that was the issue. I thought all forward slashes had to be escaped based on examples I saw. Escaping the first // is a lot more bearable. But is there some path to allow it? For example, no comments once a tag is started? I could make a little pre-processor hack that rewrite http(s)*:// as http:\//

[joethephish]

Hmm, comments are already removed in an initial pass before any other parsing is done, so it would be pretty tricky to change that!

[joekim]

Ah ok. I think a preprocessor is a good simple solution then. Thanks.