URL Extractor: what it does and how to use it

Pasted text often has links buried inside it - an email body, an article, a chat export, a scraped page - and manually picking out every URL, especially bare domains without an http:// prefix, is tedious and easy to get wrong. This tool scans pasted text for both full URLs (http:// and https://) and bare domain mentions (like example.com), trims trailing sentence punctuation that would otherwise get caught in the match, and deduplicates the results into a clean, clickable list.

Text tools look simple until a whole page, including the navigation, gets analysed and the result is nonsense. Feed it the passage you actually care about.

URL Extractor is a good fit when pulling every source link out of a long article or research document before compiling a bibliography.

The useful part

URL Extractor is built around a few practical wins, not a long feature list:

• Catches both full URLs (https://example.com/page) and bare domain mentions (example.com) in the same pass.
• Strips trailing sentence punctuation automatically - "visit example.com." extracts as "example.com", not "example.com."
• Deduplicates results, so a link mentioned three times in an article only appears once.
• Each result is clickable directly from the results list, with the correct https:// prefix added for bare domains.

Do this, in order

1. Paste your text. An article, email, chat log, or any text that may contain links.
2. Review the matches. Every detected link appears as a clickable result, deduplicated.
3. Copy one or all. Copy an individual link, or copy the whole deduplicated list at once.

Who it is for

• Pulling every source link out of a long article or research document before compiling a bibliography.
• Extracting links from a forwarded email thread or chat export.
• Auditing a block of scraped or copy-pasted content for every domain it references.
• Quickly checking whether a document contains a specific link without reading the whole thing.

If you want a clean result

• Bare domain matches are limited to common top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, .io, .co, .dev, .app, .ai, .edu, .gov) - a domain with an unusual TLD outside that list needs its http:// or https:// prefix to be detected.
• A URL immediately followed by a closing parenthesis or a colon (common in Markdown links or citations) has that trailing character stripped automatically, so the extracted link is clean.
• If a URL genuinely ends in a meaningful trailing slash or number, that is preserved - only sentence-ending punctuation (period, comma, semicolon, colon, and closing brackets) is trimmed.
• For a page with dozens of links, use "Copy all" rather than copying one at a time - it pastes the full deduplicated list, one link per line.

Common mix-ups

• Assuming a bare domain outside the common TLD list will be caught - very uncommon top-level domains need the full http:// or https:// prefix to match.
• Expecting a link split across a line break to be detected as one URL - it needs to be a contiguous run of characters.
• Clicking an extracted bare-domain result without checking where it actually goes - the tool adds https:// automatically for convenience, but does not verify the destination is safe or accurate.
• Pasting extremely large documents and expecting instant results - very long text (tens of thousands of words) can take a moment to scan.

Private by default

URL Extractor runs in your browser. The file or text you paste stays on your device. There is no account, and nothing is stored on a ToolBox server for this job.

Related tools worth opening next

If this is one step in a longer job, these usually come after it:

• Phone Number Extractor - Paste any text and instantly pull out every phone number, deduplicated and ready to copy
• URL Slug Generator - Convert any text into a clean URL-friendly slug
• Find & Replace - Find and replace text in bulk

Before you ask

Does this find links without http:// in front of them?

Yes, for common top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, .io, .co, .dev, .app, .ai, .edu, .gov) - a bare mention like "example.com" is detected even with no protocol prefix. Uncommon TLDs need the full https:// prefix to be matched.

Why does a URL sometimes lose its trailing character?

The tool trims trailing sentence punctuation - a period, comma, colon, semicolon or closing bracket - that a sentence would add after a URL, since that punctuation is part of the sentence, not the link. A real trailing slash or a meaningful trailing digit is left untouched.

Are duplicate links removed?

Yes - if the same URL appears multiple times in the pasted text, it is only listed once in the results.

Is anything I paste sent to a server?

No - the extraction runs entirely in your browser using a text pattern; your pasted text is never uploaded.

Open the URL Extractor when you are ready. It is free, and you do not need an account.