URL Extractor

URLs Embedded in Text: The Extraction Challenge

A web page's full HTML source contains links in dozens of different locations: href attributes, src attributes, action attributes in forms, data-* attributes used by JavaScript frameworks, JSON-LD structured data markup, Open Graph meta tags, canonical link elements, stylesheet imports, script source tags, and inline JavaScript strings. Manually hunting through 500 lines of HTML to compile a link inventory is tedious and produces incomplete results. URL extraction applies a pattern match across the entire source simultaneously, producing a complete list in milliseconds.

Beyond HTML, URLs appear in emails (both as visible links and in email headers), markdown documents (in link syntax and image syntax), CSV exports (in data cells and metadata), configuration files, log entries, API responses, and plain text content. The extractor handles all of these — the URL pattern is recognisable regardless of the surrounding context, and extracting it produces the same clean list whether the source is markup, structured data, or plain prose.

Link Auditing and SEO Applications

SEO link auditing requires compiling lists of all outbound and inbound links on a page. While dedicated crawler tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs handle this at scale, quick single-page audits don't require enterprise software. View source on any page, paste the HTML here, and the URL extractor gives you every link — internal, external, absolute, and relative — in one step. This is useful for verifying that a page has the expected internal links, that external links point to the right destinations, and that no unexpected or unwanted external links were added.

For content editors reviewing pages before publication, URL extraction provides a quick link check: are all the links present that should be? Are there any obsolete links pointing to pages that no longer exist? Running this check before publishing is faster than manually clicking every link in the page preview. After extraction, sort the URL list with Sort Lines to group by domain, making it easy to see all links to the same external domain at a glance.

Extracting Links from Markdown Documents

Markdown documents use two link syntaxes: inline links [text](url) and reference links [text][ref] with [ref]: url defined elsewhere. Both embed URLs as text within the markdown source. Paste a markdown file's content and the URL extractor pulls out every URL, whether in an inline link, an image reference ![alt](url), a footnote reference, or a raw URL mentioned in prose. This is useful when auditing documentation, updating link inventories before migrating a site, or verifying that a documentation update didn't break any cross-references.

Log File URL Extraction

Web server logs contain the requested URL in every access entry. When investigating unusual traffic patterns, extracting the URL component from a log excerpt surfaces all the distinct paths being requested — which then need to be sorted and deduplicated to identify the most common paths. Paste a sample of log entries, extract the URLs, remove duplicates with Remove Duplicate Lines, and sort them to quickly identify the path inventory being accessed in that log window.

API monitoring logs often record full request URLs including query parameters. Extracting these URLs from log entries gives you the complete set of queries being made against your API endpoint, which is useful for debugging unexpected query patterns, identifying which parameters are actually being used versus documented, and understanding real-world usage patterns without instrumenting the application code.

API Response and JSON Link Extraction

JSON API responses frequently contain URL fields — link relations in REST APIs, href fields in HATEOAS responses, image URLs in content APIs, and callback URLs in webhook configurations. When an API response is larger than you want to scan manually, pasting the JSON body and extracting URLs gives you the full set of links the API is returning. This is particularly useful for debugging: if you expect 10 image URLs in a response and the extractor finds 8, there are 2 missing items worth investigating.

URL Patterns Detected and Limitations

The extractor detects URLs beginning with http://, https://, ftp://, and www. prefixes. It captures the complete URL including paths, query strings, and fragments (the # portion). URLs ending with punctuation (periods, commas, closing parentheses) that are part of surrounding prose rather than the URL itself are handled by stripping the trailing punctuation — a common edge case where URL detection produces false endings. Relative URLs (paths starting with / or ../) are not detected by default since they require the base URL context to be meaningful — use your browser's developer tools or a full crawler for relative URL extraction.

For extracting email addresses from the same source document, use the companion Email Extractor — the two tools together cover the primary contact and link information typically needed in a document audit.

Privacy: Local Processing Only

The full text you paste into this tool — which may include sensitive page source, internal API responses, or confidential documentation — is processed entirely in your browser. No data is sent to any server. The URL list produced is visible only to you and stays in your browser session. This is important when extracting URLs from internal tools, staging environments, or any source that shouldn't be shared with external services.

✓Verified by ToollyX Team · Last updated June 2026