Markdown Link Extractor
Pull every link buried in a Markdown document into a clean list, each with its anchor text, URL, and line number. Inline links written as [text](url) are listed separately from images written as , so you can see at a glance which line holds which reference. Extraction runs the moment you paste, and the result is ready to copy out as plain text.
💡 About this tool
When you maintain a long README or a blog post, you eventually need to audit the links inside it: count them, find broken ones, or pull every destination URL into a spreadsheet. Searching your editor for ]( works, but you still have to count matches, track line numbers, and tell images apart from links by eye. This tool scans the text with a regular expression that matches the [...](...) pattern, then lines up every hit with its line number and a type label (link or image). Because it splits multiple links on the same line into separate entries, jobs like tallying the total link count or stripping out just the URLs become a single paste. It is aimed at engineers working with technical docs, documentation writers, and anyone who drafts notes in Markdown.
🧐 Frequently asked questions
Does it tell images and links apart?
Yes. Anything with a leading !, like , is labeled an image; a plain [text](url) is labeled a link, and the two types are shown distinctly.
Can it pick up reference-style links ([text][ref] with a separate [ref]: url)?
This tool targets inline links written as [text](url). Reference-style links that define the URL on a separate line are outside its scope.
Are bare URLs (a raw https://... typed directly) extracted?
No. Only links wrapped in Markdown's [ ]( ) syntax are matched. The square-bracket and parenthesis pair is the cue the tool looks for.
What happens when one line holds several links? Every match found on that line is listed as its own entry, and the same line number repeats for each one.
📚 Fun facts
Markdown's [text](url) link syntax has been part of the format since John Gruber published the first version in 2004, designed to spare writers from typing <a href> HTML by hand. Later spin-offs such as GitHub Flavored Markdown and CommonMark tidied up images ![]() and reference links, but wrapping the URL in parentheses has stayed constant throughout. One long-standing quirk is that a URL containing its own parentheses — think of a Wikipedia disambiguation page — can trip up a naive parser, which stops at the first closing bracket it sees. It is a classic edge case for Markdown processors, so when you extract links it is worth glancing over the results for any URLs that carry their own brackets.