Seeking advice on how to use regex for capturing part of a markdown link

[troejgaard]

I have not tried to use the “Scan Text” smart rule action with RegEx on markdown before. I just tried enabling IndexRawMarkdownSource and creating a new document with links after that. It also doesn’t work for me. It does work with things that are not links, like HTML <tags> — actually, I don’t seem to need the Hidden Preference for that. But for [links](https://) it only shows [links]. I didn’t rebuild the database though, because I don’t want this currently, so I don’t now if that is the reason.

What I can quickly find in the forum seems conflicting.

Here Bluefrog says this (march 2023):

How to find reliably an image and its use in a Markdown file

The need to find these file “pairs” arises quite frequently Why? And that link isn’t part of the rendered Markdown do it’s not indexed as content. (This has been covered more than once on the forums. ) If you want to search the code of Markdown, you need to enable the hidden preference IndexRawMarkdownSource. You’ll also need to rebuild the database to index the source of existing Markdiwn files.

But september 2022 he says this, specifically about the “Scan Text” smart rule action:

Smart Rule to Rename Based on Contents

Note: I was informed by @cgrunenberg the hidden preference will not be used by the Scan Text function. The smart rule action is searching the rendered content on demand, not using the database’s index. Testing indeed bears this out. So a script would need to be used if you have arbitrary MultiMarkdown metadata, e.g., Bassist: Michael Manring.

Does that still stand? Is the “Scan Text” a case where IndexRawMarkdownSource has no effect?