A link extractor alternative that works entirely on pasted HTML source extracts the href targets from pasted source, without ever making a network request to the listed URLs. The tool scans start tags for href attributes on a, area, and link elements, normalizes web, mail, and telephone links, and deduplicates the result so each destination appears once in first-seen order. Because nothing leaves the browser, there is no signup, no extension, no proxy, and no risk of triggering the destinations in the audit. An optional HTTP or HTTPS base URL resolves root-relative, path-relative, parent-relative, and scheme-relative values into absolute addresses, so /pricing under https://example.com/products/page becomes https://example.com/pricing rather than a path you have to fix by hand. Executable schemes such as javascript, data, and vbscript are filtered out along with empty hrefs and same-document fragments, and the interface reports how many of those entries were skipped so the count of unique results is not a black box.
What a Source-Based Link Extractor Actually Does
Most "link extractor" tools in the wild fall into two camps: full-page crawlers that fetch the URL for you, and browser extensions that read the live DOM of the page you have open. A link extractor that parses pasted source is a third option, and it behaves more like a static parser than a spider. You provide the HTML, optionally supply the page URL so relative paths can be resolved, and the tool returns a deduplicated list of href targets. The page itself is never contacted, which removes an entire class of risk from security and migration audits where clicking or probing the wrong target could matter.
The contract for this kind of tool is intentionally narrow. The parser scans start tags only, looks for href on a, area, and link elements, and ignores anchor text, surrounding markup, and any indication of which links are navigational, canonical, or preload. Three element types are included because a source inventory should reflect everything the document actually references: ordinary anchors, image-map areas, and document-level link elements such as stylesheets, icons, canonical pages, or alternate resources. Comments and raw-text containers such as script, style, textarea, title, iframe, noembed, and noframes are stripped before scanning, so a string that looks like anchor markup inside a JavaScript template literal does not turn into a false link.
How to Extract Links From Pasted HTML Source
- Open the page you are authorized to inspect in your browser, view its source, and copy the HTML into the Link Extractor input. If you do not have a live page, paste HTML produced by your own crawler instead.
- Enter the absolute page URL in the base URL field when the source uses relative paths such as /pricing, ../guide, or //cdn.example.com/file.css. Leave the field empty if every href is already absolute.
- Run the extraction and read the three counters together: unique, duplicate, and skipped. The unique count is your inventory, the duplicate count tells you how much repetition the source carried, and the skipped count tells you how many empty, fragment-only, executable, or invalid targets were filtered out.
- Copy the one-per-line result for the next step in your workflow, then verify status, redirects, rel meaning, and any links added by JavaScript with a separate authorized crawler or browser DOM export.
The base URL field is the single most common source of confusion. When a valid HTTP or HTTPS base URL is supplied, the parser uses the browser URL model to resolve root-relative, path-relative, parent-relative, and scheme-relative hrefs into absolute addresses. Without a base, relative values are left relative on purpose so the output never invents a host. The base URL cannot contain user credentials, and non-HTTP schemes such as file: or ftp: are rejected, both of which would otherwise leak user info into every resolved result or produce a misleading resolution context.
Relative Paths, Base URLs, and Resolution Rules
Resolution rules matter because the same pasted HTML produces different outputs depending on what base URL you supply. A document that contains href="/pricing" on a page served at https://example.com/products/page resolves to https://example.com/pricing. The same href pasted with no base stays as /pricing, which is correct for an offline archive but useless for a crawler that expects absolute URLs. Scheme-relative hrefs such as //cdn.example.com/assets/style.css take the scheme of the base URL, so HTTP and HTTPS sources resolve to the matching protocol. Parent-relative paths such as ../../guide follow directory rules in the usual way.
Mail and telephone links are kept on purpose. mailto:[email protected] and tel:+15551234567 are valid link destinations even though a web crawler cannot visit them, and dropping them would hide legitimate contact data from the inventory. The parser decodes a bounded set of HTML character references inside href values: decimal and hexadecimal numeric references plus the named set amp, quot, apos, lt, and gt. That covers the common case of an ampersand appearing inside a query string. Rare named references stay encoded rather than being silently substituted from a guessed global table, which is safer when the result will be re-parsed downstream.
| Input href | Base URL | Resolved target |
|---|---|---|
| /pricing | https://example.com/products/page | https://example.com/pricing |
| ../guide | https://example.com/products/page | https://example.com/guide |
| //cdn.example.com/file.css | https://example.com/ | https://cdn.example.com/file.css |
| https://other.com/a | https://example.com/ | https://other.com/a |
| mailto:[email protected] | any | mailto:[email protected] |
| #section | https://example.com/page | skipped (fragment only) |
How Source Parsing Differs From Crawlers and Browser Extensions
Picking a link extractor alternative is really a question about which trust boundary you want. Crawler-based tools fetch the URL themselves, so they always see the final rendered DOM, but they require network access, may be blocked, can log your IP against the target, and quietly follow redirects that change the meaning of the inventory. Browser extensions read the live DOM of the page you have open, which catches JavaScript-injected links but ties the tool to a specific browser, often requires broad permissions, and still depends on you being authorized to load the page in the first place. A source-based extractor sits in the middle: it sees the static markup exactly as it was served, with no rendering and no network side effects, and the output is identical no matter who runs it.
| Approach | What it sees | Network needed | JavaScript-injected links | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Source-based extractor | Static HTML you paste | No | No | Audits, migrations, offline review |
| Browser extension | Rendered DOM of an open tab | Only the page itself | Yes | Manual inspection of a live page |
| Cloud crawler | Final HTML after redirects and JS | Yes, from the tool's servers | Yes | Large-scale discovery across many pages |
| Custom script | Whatever the script targets | Depends on the script | Only if you parse the rendered DOM | Pipelines that already speak Python or Node |
The source-based approach wins on repeatability. Two reviewers paste the same HTML and get the same list, with the same skip count, and the result can be checked into version control or attached to a ticket. Crawler and extension results drift with redirects, timeouts, and client-side state, which makes them harder to defend in an audit trail.
Reading the Output: Counts, Order, and What Gets Skipped
The result panel exposes three counters because each one answers a different question. The unique count is the size of the inventory. The duplicate count tells you how much repetition the source carried, which is often a signal of template or sidebar noise. The skipped count is the safety net: it tells you that some hrefs were seen and discarded, so a short unique list does not mean the source was small. Skipped targets include empty hrefs, same-document fragments, invalid absolute URLs, and any href whose scheme is javascript:, data:, or vbscript:.
First-seen order is preserved on purpose. If the source lists the navigation before the footer links, the output preserves that order, which makes it easy to compare against the page layout or to feed the list into a review sheet that uses source order as a hint. Deduplication is exact after normalization, which means two hrefs that differ only by tracking parameters, fragments, case, or redirect behavior still count as different targets. The tool does not pretend that https://Example.com/A and https://example.com/a point to the same resource, and it does not strip utm_source tokens for you. Treat the output as raw inventory and apply your own canonicalization rules on top.
| href value seen in source | Action | Why |
|---|---|---|
| https://example.com/a | Included | Standard absolute URL |
| /a (with valid base) | Included after resolution | Resolved to absolute |
| https://example.com/a (second occurrence) | Deduplicated | Same target after normalization |
| #intro | Skipped | Same-document fragment |
| Skipped | Empty href | |
| javascript:void(0) | Skipped | Executable scheme |
| data:text/html,... | Skipped | Embedded-data scheme |
| mailto:[email protected] | Included | Legitimate non-web destination |
| tel:+15551234567 | Included | Legitimate non-web destination |
| https://exa mple.com | Skipped | Invalid URL |
When a Source-Based Extractor Is the Wrong Tool
The tool is honest about what it does not do. It does not fetch the page, so it cannot tell you whether a target returns 200, 301, or 404; that has to come from a separate authorized crawler. It does not evaluate rel attributes, so canonical, nofollow, sponsored, and ugc signals are not surfaced in the output. It does not label internal versus external links, because the parser only sees the source you paste, not the network topology. It also does not render JavaScript, which means any link injected after scripts run is absent from the result.
Severely malformed markup can also produce a different DOM from the bounded scan, because the implementation is a source parser rather than a full browser HTML tree builder. For a legal, security, or migration audit, compare the original source against a browser DOM export and a real crawler rather than trusting one extraction channel. Input is capped at 200,000 characters to keep the interactive scan bounded, so very large documents should be split or handled with a controlled crawler. None of these are bugs so much as the shape of the contract, and recognizing them up front is what makes a source-based link extractor a useful piece of the workflow rather than a black box.
Related reading: Link Extractor API Alternative: A Local Source Parser.
Related reading: Bulk Link Extractor: Parse and Deduplicate Pasted HTML.