Extract URLs from Text
Paste any text, article, or HTML page source and instantly extract every URL and link as a clean deduplicated list. Handles plain-text URLs and HTML href attributes.
How to Extract URLs from Text
Features
Why Trailing Punctuation Stripping Matters
When URLs appear in natural-language text, they are typically embedded in sentences. The sentence ends with a period — but the period is not part of the URL. A naive URL extractor would include the trailing period and produce the unusable URL https://example.com. rather than the correct https://example.com. The same problem occurs with URLs inside parentheses (the closing parenthesis is often not part of the URL), and URLs followed by a comma, semicolon, or quotation mark in quoted text.
This tool strips a defined set of trailing characters (period, comma, semicolon, colon, exclamation mark, question mark, closing parenthesis, closing bracket, closing brace, quotation marks) from each detected URL. This produces clean, usable URLs in all common prose contexts. For further manipulation of the URL list — like removing duplicate lines or sorting by domain — use Remove Duplicate Lines and Sort Lines.
The tricky part is drawing the line correctly, since URLs can legitimately end in some of these same characters — a query string can end in a closing bracket, a Wikipedia URL can contain a literal parenthesis in the page title. The stripping logic here is tuned for the overwhelmingly common case (prose punctuation, not URL syntax) rather than the rare edge case, which occasionally means a URL with a genuinely meaningful trailing character gets trimmed along with the punctuation — worth a quick visual check if a URL in the results looks unexpectedly short.
Practical Workflows for URL Extraction
Broken link checking: Copy an article or webpage, extract all external links, paste the URL list into a bulk link checker. This workflow takes under a minute to set up versus manually finding and testing each link by eye. Running this check periodically on long-lived content — a resources page, an old blog archive — catches link rot before readers do, since destinations that were valid when a page was written silently disappear over time.
Content research: Research articles often cite their sources as inline URLs. Extracting all URLs gives you a complete source bibliography. Copy the article text, extract URLs, and you have every reference listed.
Web auditing: Paste an HTML page source to see every URL the page references — images, scripts, stylesheets, external links. This is useful for performance auditing (how many third-party domains does the page load from?) and privacy auditing (what external services is the page connecting to?). For extracting email addresses from the same source, use the Extract Emails tool.
Migration and redirects: When moving content between platforms or restructuring a site, extracting every internal URL from the old site's exported pages gives you a definitive list to build a redirect map from — far more reliable than trying to reconstruct the URL structure from memory or a sitemap that may already be out of date.
What an Extracted URL Doesn't Tell You
A URL that extracts cleanly isn't necessarily the URL you'll actually land on. Shortened links (bit.ly, t.co, tinyurl.com and similar services) extract as-is — the tool has no way to follow the redirect and show you the real destination, since that would require an actual network request this browser-local tool deliberately doesn't make. If you're auditing a list of links for safety or destination before clicking through, shortened URLs need a separate unshortening step; treat them as unknown destinations until checked.
Tracking parameters are the other thing extraction preserves faithfully but doesn't explain. A URL like example.com/article?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=july extracts whole, tracking parameters and all — which is usually correct (the parameters are part of the actual URL), but worth knowing if you're deduplicating a list and want to treat "the same article via two different campaigns" as one destination rather than two separate entries. That kind of normalisation is a manual step after extraction, not something this tool does automatically.
Who Uses URL Extraction — Specific Audiences and Scenarios
SEO analysts extract URLs from competitor articles to check which external sources and tools they link to. Content editors auditing a blog post for broken outbound links extract all URLs first, then bulk-check them in a link validator. Web archivists extract URLs from crawled page sources to build URL lists for archiving with the Wayback Machine or similar services. Researchers extract citation links from literature to compile a bibliography.
Developers use URL extraction when processing log files — application logs often contain request URLs, API endpoints, and redirect chains embedded in mixed text. Extracting only the URLs makes log analysis much faster. Security analysts paste email source text to extract and inspect embedded URLs for phishing indicators. After extraction, use the Remove Duplicate Lines tool to deduplicate the URL list if the same URL appears multiple times in the source text.
What Browser-Based URL Extraction Means for Privacy
All URL extraction happens inside your browser — no text is sent to any server. This is important when processing internal documentation, proprietary source code, or confidential emails that contain URLs you need to extract. A server-based tool would receive a copy of your full text to process it. This tool uses a JavaScript regex pattern directly in your browser, processes the text locally, and produces the URL list without any network request.
For documents where even the URL structure is sensitive (internal service endpoints, admin panel URLs, private S3 bucket paths), the browser-local approach ensures no exposure. When NOT to use this tool: very large documents (100KB+) may be slow to process in older browsers due to regex matching across large strings. For structured data (JSON, XML, HTML), a purpose-built parser will produce more accurate URL extraction than regex. For extracting email addresses from the same text, the Extract Emails tool covers the companion use case.
One more honest caveat: bare-domain matching (catching "www.example.com" without a protocol) is inherently fuzzier than matching a full https:// URL, since plain text occasionally contains something that looks domain-shaped but isn't meant as a link — a version number, a file path, or a stylised brand name written with dots. The plain-domain option is off by default for this reason; turn it on when you specifically expect bare domains in the source, and give the results a quick scan rather than assuming every match is a genuine link.