Web Authoring Tools - Is there any free online link text extractor?

Author

Is there any free online link text extractor?

Jukka K. Korpela

2006-07-10, 7:41 pm

I'm looking for an online service that takes a URL as input and returns a
list of links on the page, identified by their link texts (and perhaps other
data such as href URL and title attribute value). Preferably it should be
configurable to list the links by appearance order or in an alphabetic
order.

This would be useful for evaluating and testing whether link texts are
meaningful, understandable in isolation, not duplicated, etc. I know that
Opera and Firefox have such a feature built-in, but it's rather simplistic
and not as handy in many situations as an online service could be.

I could write such a utility but I'd rather find an existing one. Although
the principle is simple and basic implementation straightforward, there are
many details to be considered, and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Chris Morris

2006-07-10, 7:41 pm

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> writes:
> I'm looking for an online service that takes a URL as input and
> returns a list of links on the page, identified by their link texts
> (and perhaps other data such as href URL and title attribute
> value). Preferably it should be configurable to list the links by
> appearance order or in an alphabetic order.

I wrote one of those a while back:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/its/services/w...ls/linkcontext/

It doesn't have all the features you asked about (though they're good
ideas, I don't have time to work on them now), and the HTML parser is
a bit more fragile than most web browsers on some types of invalid code.

It only finds links from <a> and <area> tags.

> I could write such a utility but I'd rather find an existing
> one. Although the principle is simple and basic implementation
> straightforward, there are many details to be considered, and I don't
> want to reinvent the wheel.

I expect I've also missed some details, of course.

When I wrote it back in 2003 I couldn't find anything similar online -
there may have been others written since.

--
Chris