URL Extractor
Extract unique URLs from notes, emails, or pasted text.
About this tool
URL Extractor
URL Extractor pulls every link out of a block of text or HTML and lists them, so you can get a clean set of URLs from messy source material.
How to use it
- Paste text, HTML, or anything containing links.
- The extracted URLs are listed below.
- Copy the list.
Why URL extraction is harder than it looks
Finding URLs by pattern means deciding where one ends, and that is genuinely ambiguous. A URL at the end of a sentence is usually not meant to include the full stop, but a full stop is legal inside a URL path, so any rule will occasionally be wrong.
Closing brackets have the same problem. A link inside parentheses usually should not include the closing bracket, but Wikipedia URLs legitimately contain them. Extraction tools apply heuristics that are right most of the time rather than a rule that is right always.
When it helps
- Collecting every link from a page or an email for review.
- Building a list of references from a document.
- Auditing which external sites a piece of content points to.
- Pulling links out of a chat export or a plain-text file.
Common mistakes
- Assuming the list is exhaustive. Links built by JavaScript at runtime do not exist in the source text.
- Not checking for trailing punctuation before using the URLs.
- Extracting from rendered text rather than HTML, which loses the href of any link whose visible text is not the URL.
