I'd tried negative lookahead before without success. But your suggestion made me try harder and I finally got it to work! I had a problem with the order of the characters in $junk being strangely significant until I switched to single quotes: 
my $junk   = '<>]="\'';

$text =~ s{(?!$junk)\b($urls:[$any] +?)(?=[$punc]* [^$any]|$) }{<a hre
+f="$1">$1</a>}migox;

[download]
/me hugs suaveant

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: url to html regex problem by Anonymous Monk
in thread url to html regex problem by Anonymous Monk

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