For those of us benighted individuals living without TextExpander, I created a shell script that puts the HTML href line back into the clipboard, ready for pasting wherever. So I have 2 files: prettyURL.pl which has Bart's Perl script from the lesson and a shell script file, called prettyURL.sh, with the following:

#!/bin/bash
perl prettyURL.pl | pbcopy

As Allister says, because I can.