programming question

That's basically how it's done. I don't know a lot about Perl, but that's exactly the method I would use in ColdFusion or ASP. I'm not sure what you mean by "it would capter all before _space_" though.

i am guessing everything up to the space, so if you have a URL string
URL_wincustomize

but typed in
URL_wincustomize-this-is-cool

the script would also grab the "-this-is-cool" bit on the end.

you are also letting an end of line indicate the end of a URL arent you?

however, unless you want to create a set of rules for detecting the end of a URL, i suspect this is the best you can do.