You can use Regexp::Common::URI to detect the the urls in plain text and perform a substitution. Assuming the text is in $_, the following will wrap with anchor tags, with the host as text.

use CGI qw/:html/;
use Regexp::Common qw/URI/;

s/$RE{URI}{HTTP}/a( {href => $1}, $3)/eg;
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Untested. The /e flag on the substitution executes the CGI::a() function to obtain the substitute. The /g flag makes the substitution for all recognised urls in the text.

if ($this_portion_of_string_is_a_url) {
  $this_portion_of_string_is_a_url =
    qq(<a href="$this_portion_of_string_is_a_url">$this_portion_of_str
+ing_is_a_url</a>);
}
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But, you may want to borrow from Pod::Html a subroutine called make_URL_href:

sub make_URL_href($){
    my( $url ) = @_;
    if( $url !~
        s{^(http:[-\w/#~:.+=&%@!]+)(\?.*)$}{<a href="$1$2">$1</a>}i ){
        $url = "<a href=\"$url\">$url</a>";
    }
    return $url;
}
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Update: fixed paragraph

So, what you are saying is that I can take something like this:



$_pageOfContent = qq~
Hello my name is so and so, and I really recommend this website becaus
+e I think it has some really cool ideas, you can find it at the websi
+te located on http://www.mydom.com and also on this other one here ht
+tp://www.yourdom.com.

Thank you much,
Me~;

$_pageOfContent = make_URL_href($_pageOfContent);
# Now $_pageOfContent will have this content:
#Hello my name is so and so, and I really recommend this #website beca
+use I think it has some really cool ideas, #you can find it at the we
+bsite located on
#<a href="http://www.mydom.com">http://www.mydom.com</a> #and also on 
+this other one here
#<a href="http://www.yourdom.com">http://www.yourdom.com</a>.
#
#Thank you much,
#Me
#?

sub make_URL_href($){
    my( $url ) = @_;
    if( $url !~
        s{^(http:[-\w/#~:.+=&%@!]+)(\?.*)$}{<a href="$1$2">$1</a>}i ){
        $url = "<a href=\"$url\">$url</a>";
    }
    return $url;
}
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Is that right?
thank you.

Why don't you just try it and see if it works? At last count very few computers went supercritical and blew up from running a piece of Perl-script. It is quite safe to do, you know.

CountZero

"It can't get any worse
****BOOOM****
It got worse."

See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html for a description of links in HTML 4.01 documents.

Update:

If you are using CGI then you can:

print $q->p (
    "This is a paragraph including a link: ",
    $q->a({href=>"http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=623101"},"Samp
+le link"),
    " to the node containing this sample."
    );
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Thank you Zaxo and Anon.

sub GetLinks {
    $text = shift;
    use Regexp::Common;

    $text =~ s[($RE{URI}{HTTP})]
          [<a href = "$1" target="_blank">$1</a>]g;
    return($text);
}
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that subroutine works...

Many a thanks!!