Perl convert url string to link

Question

I am looking for a way to find a url in a string and convert it to a link.

The url may be anywhere in the string (beginning, middle, or the end).

Regex is preferred but CPAN modules are welcome.

Answer 1

Most common solution is Regexp::Common (no pun intended). You need to use {-keep} version as shown below to keep the match (in $1, obviously)

use Regexp::Common qw /URI/;

while (<>) {
    /$RE{URI}{HTTP}{-keep}/ and print "<A HREF="$1">My Link Name</A>";
} 

As is hopefully obvious, the above example only finds 1 link per line. Fixing for more is left as exercise for the user.

---

Another option is Schwern's URI::Find. From POD example:

use CGI qw(escapeHTML);
use URI::Find;
my $finder = URI::Find->new(sub {
    my($uri, $orig_uri) = @_;
    return qq|<a href="$uri">$orig_uri</a>|;
});
$finder->find(\$text, \&escapeHTML);
print "<pre>$text</pre>";