Here's a sub I wrote (it works) to change URLs to include the tags to be outputed to HTML. You might be able to fool around with it. 
sub urlcheck($newline)
{
 $newline =~ s/http\:\/\//\<a href \= \"http\:\/\//ig;
 if (substr ($newline, $#newline - 1, 1) eq ".")
 {
  $x = substr ($newline, /\G/, $#newline - 1);
 }
 else
 {
 $x = substr ($newline, /\G/); 
 }
 $page = $x;
 $page =~ s/(http\:\/\/)|(\<\/a\>)|\=|\"|(href)|(\<a)|(\w+[ ]+)//g;
 $newline =~ s/$x/$x\"\>$page\<\/a\>/;    
 return $newline;
}

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BTW, it checks to see if the URL is at the end of a sentence and therefore might have an extra period.

In reply to RE: Regex to find URLs in a string by FouRPlaY
in thread Regex to find URLs in a string by Anonymous Monk

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