This isn't a supported option, for a number of reasons.

You're really meant to add URLs from the browser, since those use your existing cookie state, including web-based proxy access and other site logins. While Zotero has the ability to save directly from URLs (which would be roughly equivalent to what you'd get when you save on zotero.org, barring IP-based subscription access), the results might not be as good, so it's not something we encourage when you have the Zotero Connector available.

This is the reason you can't, say, paste a list of URLs into Add Item by Identifier the way you can paste in a list of DOIs (which itself has the downside of not using any web-based proxy you have to download PDFs, though it will use an IP-based proxy). We could consider adding that for cases like yours, but I'd be concerned that some people might start to add individual URLs that way instead of loading them in the browser, which wouldn't be ideal.

If I drag and drop a bookmark from firefox this works perfectly.

It doesn't, actually. Dragging a URL will create a webpage item, but it won't run translation on the page to grab metadata. I'll fix that, but for the reasons above, it's still not really a recommended workflow.

That aside, dragging multiple URLs just seems to be poorly implemented across various browsers and applications. It's possible we could make that work from some browsers, but I'm not sure we could make it work reliably.

I looked for the "Add Webpage" option in the menu but there's no entry.

Because you're not meant to add webpages by hand. See the note here:

https://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library#manually_adding_items

That said, if you really want to do this, you can save a newline-separated list of URLs to a text file, open Tools → Developer → Run JavaScript, and run this code, after adjusting the path on the first line:

var path = '/home/username/Desktop/urls.txt';
var urls = Zotero.File.getContents(path).split('\n').map(url => url);
await Zotero.HTTP.processDocuments(
urls,
async function (doc) {
var translate = new Zotero.Translate.Web();
translate.setDocument(doc);
var translators = await translate.getTranslators();
if (translators.length) {
translate.setTranslator(translators[0]);
try {
await translate.translate();
return;
}
catch (e) {}
}
await ZoteroPane.addItemFromDocument(doc);
}
)

This won't load JavaScript on the page before trying to save, so some pages might not save properly. (There's a way to do that, but it's more complicated and much slower.)

See here https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/javascript_api#running_ad_hoc_javascript_in_zotero

Thanks for that, if I get some time I'll go through it but you're right that processDocuments seems to be doing fine. I've ended up with this code which is working well, I made all the calls synchronous and added some error catching.

```
var path = '~/Desktop/temp/Exported Items.txt';
var urls = Zotero.File.getContents(path).split('\n').map(url => url);

rv = ""

for (var url of urls) {
try {
await Zotero.HTTP.processDocuments(
url,
async function(doc) {
rv += "\n" + url + ": ";
if (!doc) {
rv += ("doc is null")
return;
}
var translate = new Zotero.Translate.Web();
translate.setDocument(doc);
var translators = await translate.getTranslators();

if (translators.length) {
translate.setTranslator(translators[0]);
try {
await translate.translate();
rv += "translated successfully "
return;
} catch (e) {
rv += "translation failed with " + e
}
}
await ZoteroPane.addItemFromDocument(doc);
rv += "Succeeded"
}
)
} catch (e) {
rv += "\n" + url + (" Failed Download");
}
}

return rv + ("\nAll Documents Processed")
```

For the record I'm moving from Firefox bookmarks to Zotero for managing this content. I've looked at a bunch of tools including Polarized, Notion, Mendeley, Papers app, pinboard, Hypothes.is, Diigo, etc. but none of them have all the features I need. Zotero is the closest though so if a few of these kinks get ironed out this use case might be a source of new users.

Oh good to know thanks, unfortunately can't remember the issue I was having with it but think my final code didn't change much.

var path = '~/Desktop/temp/Exported Items.txt';
needs to be the filepath to your file with URLs.

Sorry for posting again, but I'm new to Zotero and not familiar with JavaScript. I am also trying to extract meta-data from a large number of URLs at once. I've tried using the code posted by dstillman (the first one, not the second) and the code posted by camjohnson, both with changing the var path to my designated file. In both cases, I get "SyntaxError: malformed Unicode character escape sequence" and no messages in the error console. The only difference I can think of is that I am using Windows instead of Linux. I've been trying to find the error but am having difficulties. Can someone at least point me in the direction of how to debug this?

(If you know what character set it is (e.g., 'windows-1252'), you can also pass it as the second parameter to getContents().)

It defaults to UTF-8 — you don't need to pass that. The point is that you can pass non-UTF-8 charsets if necessary.

As I say, it could also be due to invalid characters in the file, in which case the charset won't matter — and that's fairly likely, because nearly all URLs would generally be ASCII anyway, so other charsets generally shouldn't come into play. If you just paste a couple URLs into a new file, I think you'll find it works fine.

I'm pretty sure these are actually Windows line endings messing with you/the script. Try replacing split('\n') with split('\r\n')

For anyone interested, I was able to work around the error by pasting the URLs into JavaScript instead of using a text file.

The final code looks like this (with actual URLs pasted into var path)

var path = "URL1,URL2,URL3";
var urls = path.split(',');
await Zotero.HTTP.processDocuments(
urls,
async function (doc) {
var translate = new Zotero.Translate.Web();
translate.setDocument(doc);
var translators = await translate.getTranslators();
if (translators.length) {
translate.setTranslator(translators[0]);
try {
await translate.translate();
return;
}
catch (e) {}
}
await ZoteroPane.addItemFromDocument(doc);
}
)

Since non-raised voices can't be heard here is one ;)

I would also like to import a list of URLs, or to be more precise, I want Zotero to visit each URL and mimic the behavior of pushing the "Save to Zotero" button. My overall workflow is to feed a JS file to Zotero via BBT's debug bridge that then reads the URLs from a file just as discussed above. I've been trying to use both "main" variants shown above but was only successful with processDocuments and not loadDocuments (yet).

My main question though is why all variants above have a return after translate.translate(). This does not make any sense to me because then the later ZoteroPane.addItemFromDocument is never executed (and thus nothing added to the database)?

I am nevertheless almost satisfied with the additional error handling camjohnson's version provides - one small thing I would like to check is that none of docs is of type web page (as this is most likely to be an error in my use case). Is there a way to do that (before inserting the result into the db, i.e. within the processDocuments processor)?

Also, is there any way to debug this code better? I have been using the Zotero.debug() and the debug output window so far but this is rather ineffective.

Also, is there any way to debug this code better? I have been using the Zotero.debug() and the debug output window so far but this is rather ineffective.

Zotero.debug() is the thing to use, but you can use a terminal window instead of the debug output window.

Can't get to use this script
var path = '/home/username/Desktop/urls.txt';
var urls = Zotero.File.getContents(path).split('\n').map(url => url);
await Zotero.HTTP.processDocuments(
urls,
async function (doc) {
var translate = new Zotero.Translate.Web();
translate.setDocument(doc);
var translators = await translate.getTranslators();
if (translators.length) {
translate.setTranslator(translators[0]);
try {
await translate.translate();
return;
}
catch (e) {}
}
await ZoteroPane.addItemFromDocument(doc);
}
)
I'm getting Zotero is not defined. I'm trying to import multiple urls tried to import from Chrome history but didn't succed

@dstillman My bad I was trying to run it from Chrome's console, but now when I run it from Zotero JavaScript it returns this error
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520001 (NS_ERROR_FILE_UNRECOGNIZED_PATH) [nsIFile.initWithPath]" nsresult: "0x80520001 (NS_ERROR_FILE_UNRECOGNIZED_PATH)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/file.js :: Zotero.File</this.getContents :: line 159" data: no]

People who are getting a FileInputStream error -- you are adjusting the filepath in the script to a file that exists, yes?