Detect HTML elements in a text variable.

Does anyone know of a function or code which will detect HTML elements in a plain text variable?

I have a plain text string variable containing the content of an email, which I want to detect any HTML type elements (http, mailto, etc.) and output a new variable with the html elements transformed into clickable href's.

I thought I saw something that did this a few years ago, but now I can't locate the code.

You can look at www.cflib.org for a UDF that might help. Here is any example

http://cflib.org/udf.cfm?ID=664

Hope it helps