You need to get the URL from the DB anyway, so there is no difference between something like
print $URL
and
print '<a href="'.$URL.'"'>'.$URL.'</a>'
I'm not sure where preging comes into it.
This doesn't really create issues when showing the URL, but the other way would allow for more customizing in the templates. For example, showing text instead of the URL, like:
'<a href="'.$URL.'"'>This is a link!</a>'
In my case, I'm using jEvents to manage multiple sources and need to have some of those sources redirect to their specific components. Without altering the above mentioned line, I could only get very ugly listings (full URLs instead of linked titles for example).