URLs-LE: Zero Hassle URL Extraction

Pull every URL out of the current file in one keystroke
Any text file — Markdown, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, YAML, Properties, TOML, INI and XML know what to exclude

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, press Ctrl+Alt+U (Cmd+Alt+U on Mac), and every URL in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate and sort it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Link auditing — every link, autolink, and plain URL in Markdown and HTML (code blocks and comments excluded)
• Source review — URLs in string literals, template literals, and comments across JS/TS
• Config sweep — URLs in JSON strings, YAML values, Java properties, TOML/INI values, and XML (Maven POMs, feeds)

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same extraction engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_urls(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns every URL with its protocol and 1-based line and column, capped at 500 by default with meta.truncated so a large file cannot flood the agent's context window.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as urls-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/urls-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "urls-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "urls-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g urls-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "urls-le": { "command": "urls-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y urls-le-mcp

The CLI

The same extraction runs from a terminal or a shell pipeline: a Rust CLI in crate/, sharing one corpus with the extension — crate/fixtures/ — so the two can never read a document differently.

urls-le .                     # every URL in the tree
urls-le --dedupe docs/        # one line per distinct URL
urls-le mcp                   # the same extraction over MCP on stdio

# the point of the whole thing:
urls-le . | jq -r '.urls[].value' | sort -u | lychee -

Exit codes follow grep — 0 URLs found, 1 none found, 2 the question was malformed — so if urls-le src/; then … works and finding nothing is an answer rather than an error.

It has no opinions, deliberately. No link checking, no insecure-scheme flag, no filtering. An http:// URL is wrong in a production config and right in a test fixture; a tool that decides for you is one you configure, then argue with, then mute — and the muting takes the extraction with it. Pipe it to lychee and let that have the opinions.

Supported formats

No document is refused. The eleven above know what to exclude; every other language id — python, go, shellscript, csv, plaintext, log, whatever your editor calls it — is scanned whole, because a URL is unambiguous in any text and there is nothing in those worth excluding.

Extracted protocols: http, https, ftp, file, mailto (requires an @), tel. Every occurrence is reported with its real line and column — TOML positions are forward-located in the source and can be approximate for repeated identical values. A URL ends at whitespace or a quote/bracket delimiter, so relative links (/docs) and bare domains (example.com) are never extracted, and URLs containing raw spaces extract as space-terminated partials. Trailing ./, are kept — they are legal URL characters.

Commands

Settings

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)

Both halves are covered — the manifest (command titles, setting names and descriptions) and everything shown while the extension runs (notifications, the status bar, the sort quick-pick). The extension follows VS Code's display language, so it matches whatever the editor is already set to; no setting of its own.

Privacy & security