Find and insert a link

[Anon]

I want to be able to search a large string
of text from a database and find any
substring starting with
'http:' or 'www.' and insert appropriate
tags around the URL so it appears as a link.

Can this be done using some regular expretion
encantation? - I'd like to avoid complex
loop based string mangeling 😛

THX in advance.

[herve]

extract from the PHP manual :

$text = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^{<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]","<a} href=\"\0\">\0</a>", $text);

come from there :
http://download.php.net/manual/en/function.ereg-replace.php