link Link (href) Extractor star

How It Works

Paste HTML source — view-source output, a saved .html file, or any copied snippet — and the tool hands that text to the browser's own HTML parser rather than a hand-written regular expression. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Real-world HTML is messy in ways a naive regex struggles with: an attribute can be wrapped in double quotes, single quotes, or no quotes at all (href=about.html is technically legal HTML), a tag can be self-closing or not, and tags can nest many levels deep, span multiple lines, or sit inside comments and <script> blocks that themselves contain angle brackets. A browser-grade parser has spent two decades absorbing every one of those edge cases, because it has to render whatever page it is handed however malformed the markup is — building the extractor on that same engine, instead of reinventing pattern matching for tags, is what makes it reliable on markup you did not author yourself, like a scraped competitor page or an old campaign export.

Once the parser has built a structural tree from the pasted markup, every <a> element's href is read directly as a property of that element rather than as raw text pulled from a string — which already sidesteps quoting quirks and stray angle brackets inside comments that could otherwise fool a pattern match. The resulting list of URLs is then deduplicated and written out one per line, ready to copy to the clipboard or download as a plain text file.

Concrete example: a page's HTML contains <a href='/pricing'>, <a href="https://example.com/blog">, and a bare <a href=mailto:[email protected]> with no quotes at all — three different quoting styles in three lines. A regex written to match href="..." would silently miss the single-quoted and unquoted cases; the parser reads all three identically, because to a browser they are simply attribute values regardless of how — or whether — they are quoted.

What You Should Know

• Relative URLs such as /pricing or ../blog/post are extracted exactly as written, not resolved into full https://... addresses. Turning a relative path into an absolute URL requires knowing the page's base URL — normally the address the HTML was originally fetched from, or an explicit <base> tag — and a pasted snippet carries neither on its own.
• The tool never fetches a URL by itself; it only reads the HTML you provide. That is a deliberate boundary: auditing a page's outbound links this way needs no server-side request from this site at all, only from whatever browser you already used to view or save the source.
• mailto: and tel: links come through exactly like any other href, since the parser does not discriminate by scheme — anything sitting in an href attribute counts as a link worth listing.