How to extract external links?

[wenlzhang]

I have Dataview fields defined as Link:: [Google](https://www.google.com/) and would like to extract the link and change the display text. Is it possible to do that?

I tried elink(link, "🔗") but it did not work.

[joeydumont]

I have a similar but a bit broader question. I would like to be able to query external links as well as internal links betwen notes. So, something like

TABLE file.external_links
FROM "Project/" or #specific/project

I understand that external links are a bit more annoying to parse than regular links, since some of them will be in the footnote format, and yet others will have no "link format" at all, i.e. won't be in the form [](). I'd be okay with only []() and footnote links [][#] to be queryable.

I've read that Dataview doesn't actually parse content, which makes sense, so maybe this is because Obsidian itself doesn't provide that information that it is not currently available in Dataview? For example, I found this plugin which does something similar to what I want, but it seems to manually parse the content of a single note at a time: https://github.com/giselle197/obsidian-external-links-in-document/tree/master.

[notquitehere]

As I found this looking for an answer to the same question @joeydumont had I am adding what I found here in case it helps others in future.

It's a bit of a pain to do but you can generate a list of external URL's in a file by creating a core search plugin query and regular expressions:

```query
file:/this file name/ /\[.*\]\(.*\)/
```

Over explaining from here:

The file:/this file name/ section limits the search to the file specified and the second bit queries all the external links. The output is ugly but it does work.

Regular expressions in Obsidian are identified by wrapping them in /.

Obsidian searches are AND by default so you don't need to add an operator to make this work.

[joeydumont]

Ah, thanks, that's a good start. I used the tag: filter to get a bit of what I wanted. My workflow has changed a bit and I would like to be able to query the external links in notes that link to the current note (basically FROM [[]] in), but this is pretty good.

Thanks for sharing!