Using a Javascript regex function written by Sam Hesler at StackOverflow (thanks!), I’ve posted a simple little page that lets you turn text that has URLs in it into text that has clickable, hyperlinked URLs. That is, you go from http://www.globalvoicesonline.org to
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org.

The page is: ConvertURLsToLinks.html. It’s quite bareboned, and I’m sure there are lots of sites that do a far better job with many more options. But, it worked well enough for the one job I wanted it for, so maybe it’ll work for you. At least it won’t destroy your original text (although keep the original just in case.)

The regex function I borrowed from Sam Hesler is:

function replaceURLWithHTMLLinks(text) {
var exp = /(b(https?|ftp|file)://[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|])/ig;
return text.replace(exp,”$1“);
}