Another PERL question

Ok, here goes:

I want to find a pattern ( like with the matching operator =~ ) and store part of it as a variable. I think this is very easy, but I can't quite think of what to do.

For example:
Say I wanted to make anything surrounded by a colon ( into a link. So, I want :http://www.planetarion.com: to be replaced with <A href=http://www.planetairon.com>http://www.planetarion.com</a>

I can't just use =~ /:.*:/<A href=>/ or anything like that, becuase that would replace the whole sting.

Sorry if it's confusing, but I can get like that sometimes. Any help you can give will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Elessar

[Atamur]

$html =~ s#:(.*):#<a href=$1>$1</a>#

you may want to read perldoc perlre. all sorts of magic can be accomplished with regular expressions...

Thanks