excellent and elegant solution. the problem spec is still a bit hazy though. there's a whole host of urls that are not plain http://, do these also need pseudo-correction? e.g. https:, mailto:, javascript:, etc. even including browser specific ones such as those used in mozilla based browsers. if there's a need to fix all these other kinds of urls automatically, it would be pretty much impossible.
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H