How about using URI::Find instead? No point re-solving that problem. It even includes an example of what you're trying to do:

Wrap each URI found in an HTML anchor. 

  my $finder = URI::Find->new(
                              sub {
                                  my($uri, $orig_uri) = @_;
                                  return qq|<a href="$uri">$orig_uri</
+a>|;
                              });
  $finder->find(\$text);
[download]

Although that code is wrong. He needs to HTML-entitize the href parameter. Bleh. Here's the corrected code:

use CGI qw(escapeHTML);
  my $finder = URI::Find->new(
                              sub {
                                  my($uri, $orig_uri) = @_;
                                  $_ = escapeHTML("$_") for $uri, $ori
+g_uri;
                                  return qq|<a href="$uri">$orig_uri</
+a>|;
                              });
  $finder->find(\$text);
[download]

I just sent the author a bug report.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker