Converting pure text url to working link

[Afrow UK]

I am wondering if there is a simple and relatively decent solution to converting e.g.
www.planetquake.com
to
<a href="http://www.planetquake.com" target="_blank">www.planetquake.com</a>

Currently, my parsers will convert and stuff, so I need to convert urls that fit the following:

Do not start with href=" and do not end with "
Start with http:// (][/url) or [url]www. and end with either nothing or a space.

I'm sure this is possible, but I lack the string processing skills to get it working.

-Stu

[Afrow UK]

If noone can (or will) help me with that, may I ask a solution to this string replacement problem for my bug boards.

$input =~ s|\(.+)\[/img\]|<img src="$1">|gi;

This code will replace hello.jpg with <img src="hello.jpg">

Now here is the problem with my code.
If the user enters...
hello1.jpg
hello2.jpg
...it becomes <img src="ello1.jpghello2.jpg">.

Rather than stopping at the next after , it stops at the last that it can find in the query string.
How can I get it to stop at the next (not last) occurance.

Thanks

-Stu

[Jeff Mott]

$input =~ s|\[img\](.+?)\[/img\]|<img src="$1" alt="">|gi;The added alt attribute will help the resulting HTML to be valid.

As for your original question, I have a regex to match URIs, but it does not meet your personal requirements, in addition to being long and complicated. Let me know if you want me to post it anyway.

[Afrow UK]

Thanks for that above code, it works great.
As for [quote]'s I changed the method to this:
if (($input =~ /\[quote=/) and ($input =~ /\[\/quote\]/)) {
$input =~ s|\[quote=(.+?)\]|<table style="border: 1px dashed black; width: 100%"><tr><td style="border: 1px dashed black"><small>Quote: $1</small><hr><small>|gi;
$input =~ s|\[/quote\]|</small></td></tr></table>|gi;
}

I've decided to leave the web url conversion out, but you can post it if you like.

-Stu