as3 - detect urls in dynamic text and make them links

Anyone know of any good classes or functions that will do this? I've found some regexes but what I need is to pass the string to a method and have it return the same string, but with urls turned blue and turned into hyperlinks. Seems like a fairly common task, but I can't find anything.

EDIT - the following works for any link starting with http:

var myPattern:RegExp = /\b((?:https?:\/\/|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}\/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))/i;             
var str = text.replace(myPattern, "<font color='#04717D'><a target='_blank' href=\开发者_JAVA百科"$&\">$&</a></font>");
field.htmlText = str;

But it doesn't work for links that start with "www", because the href ends up looking like this:

<a href="www.google.com">www.google.com</a>

Would love to know how to fix that.

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I'm wary of making the existing regular expression/ replacement call any more complicated. With that in mind the most straightforward way of doing this is probably to write a second regular expression to correct any bad tags in the output from the first. I'd also add a 'g' to the end of your main regular expression so that it captures multiple URLs in the text

So, your main regular expression would now look like this:

var mainPattern:RegExp = /\b((?:https?:\/\/|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}\/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))/ig;

Your secondary regular expression will look something like this:

var secondaryPattern:RegExp = /\"www/g;

it should capture any links that don't start with "http:"

You then run both these expressions over your input string replacing as necessary:

var someText:String = "This is some text with a link in it www.stackoverflow.com and also another link http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/5239966/as3-detect-urls-in-dynamic-text-and-make-them-links";
someText = someText.replace(mainPattern, "<a target='_blank' href=\"$&\">$&</a>");
someText = someText.replace(secondaryPattern, "\"http://www");