Link Formatter

What it's for

Write links the way the place you’re pasting them wants: Markdown for notes and READMEs, HTML for web pages, BBCode for forums, Org mode, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki, reStructuredText and Textile for those writing systems, or Slack’s own link format. It converts one link or a whole list at once, and reads links already in most of those forms, so it also converts between them.

For example, when you’ve collected a list of pages for a newsletter as titles and addresses copied from a spreadsheet, paste the two columns here and copy them back as Markdown or as rich text for an email.

How to use it

Paste links, one per line, in any of these forms:

• Title and an address separated by a tab, either way round (two columns copied from a spreadsheet);

• a title then an address, or an address then a title, separated by a space, ` - ,

  ` or : ;

• a Markdown link [Title](https://…) or an HTML <a href="…">Title</a>;
• an address on its own, which gets the address without https:// and www. as its title (the page itself is never fetched).

Choose the Format; the result updates as you type. Titles are escaped as the format needs, spaces in addresses become %20, and an address starting www. gets https://. Markdown, reference style numbers each address once and lists them at the end. Copy as rich text links copies clickable links for pasting into an email, document or chat app. The format is remembered in this browser, and Copy a link keeps the links.

Example

Paste these three lines (the first has a tab between title and address):

ThoughtAsylum	https://www.thoughtasylum.com
[Toolbox](https://toolbox.thoughtasylum.com)
https://example.com/docs/

With Format set to Org mode, the result is:

[[https://www.thoughtasylum.com][ThoughtAsylum]]
[[https://toolbox.thoughtasylum.com][Toolbox]]
[[https://example.com/docs/][example.com/docs]]

Good to know

A line with no address it recognises (starting with a scheme such as https://, mailto: or www.) is skipped, and the message counts them. Only the first link on a line is read. The Slack format is the one Slack’s API and bots use; typing it into Slack’s message box shows it as text. Org mode titles can’t hold square brackets, so they become curly ones. Rich text copying needs a browser that allows it (all recent ones do).