URL Format Checker
Pull every absolute link out of pasted text or HTML and flag the ones whose syntax is wrong before they go live.
Runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded.
What it does
Many links are broken before anyone clicks them: a www address with no protocol, a curly brace left by an unfilled template variable, a URL the browser cannot parse. This checker scans pasted text or HTML for anything starting with http://, https:// or www., removes duplicates and trailing punctuation, and labels each link Syntax OK, Warning or Malformed with the reason.
It is a syntax check only. No request is sent to any link, so it cannot report 404s, redirects or server errors. Use it on email drafts, link-in-bio lists, CMS exports and campaign copy where a typo is the likely failure, and use Search Console or a crawler to find pages that no longer exist.
How to use it
- 1
Copy the text, HTML or list of URLs you want to check.
- 2
Paste it into Paste text or HTML. Results appear as soon as there is content.
- 3
Read the Found, Syntax OK, Warnings and Malformed counters.
- 4
Look at each amber or red card for its issue list and fix the link at the source.
- 5
Click Copy report to take a plain text list of every link with its status.
What you get
Four counters and a color-coded card for each unique link showing its status and issues, plus a Copy report button that produces one line per link: the status in brackets, the URL, then any issues.
When to use it
- Newsletter QA before sending
- Paste the email HTML to list every absolute link once and catch www links without https:// or URLs mangled by the template.
- Unfilled template variables
- Links containing characters such as {, }, | or ^ are marked Malformed, which is how a leftover merge tag like {{PROMO}} usually shows up.
- Auditing a link-in-bio list
- Paste the list of destinations to see which ones the browser's URL parser rejects before you update your profile.
- Deduplicating links in a long post
- Each link is reported once, even if the article repeats it, so the Found count is the number of distinct absolute URLs.
Example
Input
<p>Book at www.example.com/booking and read https://example.com/menu. Promo: https://example.com/deal?code={{PROMO}}</p>Output
Found: 3 | Syntax OK: 1 | Warnings: 1 | Malformed: 1
[Warning] www.example.com/booking: Missing protocol (http:// or https://)
[Syntax OK] https://example.com/menu
[Malformed] https://example.com/deal?code={{PROMO}}: Contains invalid URL charactersThe full stop after /menu is stripped before checking, and links are listed in the order they appear in the pasted content.
Tips
- Relative links such as href="/pricing" are not detected, because the scan only matches addresses that begin with http://, https:// or www.
- Syntax OK means the URL is well formed, not that the page exists. Open the links that matter most in a browser before sending.
- Fix Warning links in emails and PDFs by adding https://, since some clients will not turn a bare www address into a clickable link.
Questions
Will this find 404 errors on my website?
No. It never requests the links, so it cannot see status codes, redirects or dead pages. For 404s, use the Pages report in Search Console or a site crawler.
Why does a URL with a space in it show up cut short?
The scan ends a link at the first space, quote or angle bracket, so only the part before the space is checked. If a result looks truncated, the original link has a space in it and needs encoding as %20 or rewriting.
Does it read links inside href attributes as well as plain text?
Yes, as long as they are absolute. It reads the raw pasted text, so an address in an href, in visible copy or in a plain list is picked up the same way.
Are the linked sites contacted while checking?
No. Extraction and checks run in your browser with pattern matching and the browser's URL parser, and none of the linked sites is contacted.