How to Extract links from a Webpage

Turn this…

20160616-scott-on-technology-page-source

into a neat file with clean links…

20160616-scott-on-technology-extracted-links

Things you need:

  1. A web browser
  2. A webpage from which to extract links
  3. An online tool to automatically extract the links
  4. A program to open .csv files (Excel/Google Sheets/free alternative, etc.)

Hint: If you only need links from a portion of the page use Firefox.  It allows you select a portion of the page and view only the “selection source” instead of the entire page.

Process

  • Navigate to the desired webpage in your favorite browser
  • View and copy the page source
    • Chrome: “View page source”
    • Firefox: “View Page Source” or “View Selection Source”
  • Paste the copied html into an online tool and click the button to generate a CSV file with the resulting links
  • Download, open, & enjoy!

Once the file is open you can do more other things in Excel like sorting by Domain or removing duplicate links.

Online Tool for Extracting Links from webpages: