Convert text links for old blog posts to clickable hyperlinks?

Hi all

I’ve done a bit of searching for this one but can’t seem to find anything automated to do this and anything that looked promising was posted many years ago (in the WordPress 2.0 days) so unlikely to work now.

I’ve just taken over a WordPress site for a client to update it and make some changes. One thing that the owner is very keen to resolve is all his old blog posts include just text links to websites and aren’t clickable (he didn’t know how to make them hyperlinks using the post editor).

As there are several years worth of blog posts, almost all of them having a text link, is there an automatic way to convert all of those to clickable hyperlinks without going through and manually editing each post?

Hopefully there’s a solution out there, any help appreciated ??