Broken links (URL field)

mibigo
Dear all,

I haven't found a topic on this specific question. Most of the topics about "broken links" seem to concern file attachments, while I'm interested in broken URLs; meaning the URL stored in the URL field, which happens to be broken.

Is there a way to check for these broken links, a routine or an utility that could check the broken links in my library?

I can remember a program called Xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) which do that for html or word documents; basically it individuates all URLs in a document and launch a search on the internet to see whether the link is broken or not (a 404 answer from a server or a redirection are recognized, I think.) Is there something similar for Zotero?

Kind regards
Michele
  • bwiernik
    No, sorry. But I’d also imagine that such a feature wouldn’t work well anymore. Many sites nowadays don’t use traditional 404 pages, but instead redirect to a home page or similar, so any automated feature wouldn’t be able to detect if they were in error.
  • mibigo
    Well, but you could at least have a report of how many and what records have a URLs that bring to a 404 page or are redirected; I have a very large library (20 thousand records) built in the last 6 years, and i get more and more broken links in my bibliographies, which is a pity; I can't check them manually.

    Thank you anyway for your answer.
  • LiborA
    You can use Xenu program very Easy.
    1. In Zotero "Generate Report from items..." in your bibliography
    2. Save this report to your harddisk
    3. In Xenu open the html file (File ->Check URL -> Local File... or CTRL+N -> Local File...) with report and chek the errors.
  • mibigo
    Thanks, indeed this is a possibility I somehow didn't think of..
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