regex replace urls with anchors ONLY if not already in anchors

Question

I\'ve seen similar questions asked before, but none with a working solution.

I am trying to replace all urls on a page with anchor tags, but only those which aren\'t alr

Answer 1

I think you need to do a two-pass operation. Split the source into

PART1 blah> PART2 blah PART3...

Then replace urls with in each of PART1, PART2 etc, then paste it all back together.

Doing it within a single regex is going to be a headache, if not impossible, depending on your dialect.