-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

I don't think anyone mentioned the Find::URI module. I've never used it but I would hope it would either do a good job of this or you'd submit a patch for it based on other information in this thread. (:

I like the one Albannach mentions above except that I'd be sure to add "," to the list of punctuation marks! My limited experience with URL-matching regexen shows that the trailing comma is the number one problem for them.

I looked over the link merlyn gave and didn't see any regular expressions and was forced to actually start reading. (: The first line has a link to the regex that the discussed program generates. Somehow I cannot recommend the use of such a huge beast for the original requested purpose. Based on a very casual reading, I think that monster would actually match trailing punctation such as the period at the end of this sentence that also ends in a URL, http://www.perl.org/index.html.