I used regular expressions for this partially because I was writing an article on regular expressions :). You could also use the markdown processor to turn it into a piece of XHTML and the grab all of the “pre” nodes. Depending on your source, each pre node could be a valid groovy script that you could do whatever you wanted with.

So what about getting this packaged into a grails plugin?

I suppose we would just need a service that would allow you to process markdown?

Or might we want to look at an alternative implementation that doesn’t use regular expressions in favor of some other way of understanding the grammar?