Markdown to convert double asterisks to bold text in javascript

The other answers fail when a char is immediately before or after the asterisks.

This works like markdown should:

function bold(text){
    var bold = /\*\*(.*?)\*\*/gm;
    var html = text.replace(bold, '<strong>$1</strong>');            
    return html;
}
    
var result = bold('normal**bold**normal **b** n.');
document.getElementById("output").innerHTML = result;

div { color: #aaa; }
strong { color: #000; }

<div id="output"></div>

None of the provided answers works in all cases. For example, the other solutions wont work if we have a space next to the double star, ie:

This will ** not ** be bold

So I wrote this:

function markuptext(text,identifier,htmltag)
{
    var array = text.split(identifier);
    var previous = "";
    var previous_i;
    for (i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
        if (i % 2)
        {
            //odd number
        }
        else if (i!=0)
        {
            previous_i = eval(i-1);
            array[previous_i] = "<"+htmltag+">"+previous+"</"+htmltag+">";
        }
        previous = array[i];
    }
    var newtext = "";
    for (i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
        newtext += array[i];
    }
    return newtext;
}

Just call it like this:

thetext = markuptext(thetext,"**","strong");

and it will work in all cases. Of course, you can also use it with other identifiers/html-tags as you like (the stackoverflow preview should have this too).