> I included the instruction to use regular expressions to do the conversion to ANSI.

The viber coders (who I referred to in my comment) aren't giving implementation tips.

What did it give you before you put an implementation tip into your prompt?

=======

FWIW, if you're at all interested, here's my implementation:

    def markdown_ansi_code_subst(mdstr: str, src_pattern: str, replacement_start: str, replacement_end: str) -> str:
        while src_pattern in mdstr:
            mdstr = mdstr.replace(src_pattern, replacement_start, 1)
            mdstr = mdstr.replace(src_pattern, replacement_end, 1)
        return mdstr

The caller supplies the pattern (`*` for italic, `**` for bold, etc) and a start/end replacement. As you can imagine, I store all of that in a static lookup table.

I feel this is more readable than regexes.*