Search only URLs on a page?

March 12, 2011 6:31 PM

Using FireFox, can I search the link text (the URL) on a given page instead of the anchor text?

I want to search a big MeFi thread for the video ID of a YouTube vid to see if it's been posted already. I know how to use Find-As-You-Type to search the page for normal text (/) and only anchor text ('). I want to search the URLs linked from the page, since the anchor text could be anything.

Example (caution Rickroll): LOL Check this out

Can FF search this very page for oHg5SJYRHA0 inside that HTML tag, short of viewing and and searching the entire page source?

posted by BeerFilter to computers & internet (7 answers total)

If you hit ctrl-U, Firefox will open a window of the page's source code, and you can search that the exact same way you would search the page itself.
posted by emumimic at 6:40 PM on March 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

The same shortcuts for normal/anchor text work in the page source (which you can quickly access by hitting CTRL/Command + U).
posted by jouir at 6:42 PM on March 12, 2011

Whoops, should have previewed.
posted by jouir at 6:42 PM on March 12, 2011

Yeah, I was just wondering if FF had some mechanism built in that I was unaware of where one could do this without downloading the page (thinking of 1000+ comment MeFi threads) again. I know I can view source and search that, just thought there might be something baked in that would skip loading the page a 2nd time, or worked right there from the comment box, so to speak. Thanks for the responses!
posted by BeerFilter at 6:44 PM on March 12, 2011

Not by default, but there are add-ons for that. One example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-finder/

Although I'd find it easier to just hit Ctrl-U and search. I guess it all depends on how much you'll be searching
posted by just_another_one at 6:44 PM on March 12, 2011

(thinking of 1000+ comment MeFi threads)

Honestly, text is trivial to download. Even better, when you view source, you aren't downloading the images or external stylesheets. I'm betting most of the time spent loading pages with 1000+ comments is browser rendering and javascript, neither of which happen while viewing source.
posted by wayland at 10:40 PM on March 12, 2011

The current Japan thread is about 3 MB. That may be trivial to you, but if I've already got the thing loaded once I'd rather not pull it down a second time if I can avoid it. Thanks for the replies above.
posted by BeerFilter at 7:40 AM on March 13, 2011