Creating Links in data output

Hi :) I am new to PHP and new to this mailing list, so I hope I am not asking something that you tire of answering :) I am creating my first news posting application and I need a function to convert any URLS added to the news message into links. I found this snippet: function insert_links($newstext) { $ret = eregi_replace( "([[:alnum:]]+)://([^[:space:]]*)([[:alnum:]#?/&=])", "\\1://\\2\\3", $newstext); $ret = eregi_replace( "(([a-z0-9_]|\-|\.)+@([^[:space:]]*)([[:alnum:]-]))", "\\1", $ret); return($ret); } I have added this snippet to my file, but it does not work - The string $newstext still does not include links. I have tried to echo $ret, which returns nothing, and echo $newstext, which returns my text message, but without links. Does anyone have any other snippets that might work for this? Please be very 'layman' in your response - I have only been working with PHP for a couple of weeks and this is my first language to learn (other than HTML). Thanks in advance!! Summer