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in reply to Adding href where needed.

You can try a negative lookbehind assertion (in perlman:perlre), but it has to be a fixed length pattern, and so won't work if there's spaces around the '=' (so you can first fix that):
s/href\s*=\s*/href=/ig; s,(?<!(?i:href=))((?:http|ftp|news)://\S*),<a href="$1">$1</a>,g; You might try to think of something besides '\S*' also, in case the user puts in a period after the href, or puts it between parenthesis or ???.
Update: Actually, if the user DID already make an href, they may or may not have put quotes around the '=' in the url, so maybe the easiest thing to do is rewrite all urls:
# Now its starting to get ugly! $str =~ s#((?i:<a\s+href\s*=\s*"?)?(?:http|ftp|news)://[^"]+)#substr($ +1,0,1) eq '<' ? $1 : qq!<a href="$1" >$1</a>!#eg;
I think that's right now (and you still may want to replace that '[^"]' with something else) :-)

Actually, even that may not work if there's other attributes besides 'href' in the tag, but I'm done. The rest is up to you :-)