For fairly deep and intractable architectural reasons Applescript can not really manipulate RTF text. If it were something that I really needed to do, and performance were not an issue, I might explore something like:

• Capturing the RTF data from the OO row by placing its text in the clipboard, and extracting the raw rtf data from there.
  
  Code:

  set dataRTF to the clipboard as «class RTF »

• Writing the RTF data out to a file
• Converting the RTF file to HTML with a textutil command line
• Performing some string operations on the HTML to wrap potential links with <a HREF tags
• Converting the HTML back to RTF, again with textutil
• Capturing the TextEdit RTF version (now with clickable links) into the clipboard
• Replacing the OO row contents with the clipboard contents.

Maybe the OO mouse operation doesn't seem so bad now :-)

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