Print IE URLs

December 15, 2009 1:07 PM

Printing the URLs of IE Favorites

I want to print the names and URLs of a bunch of Internet Explorer Favorites. If I export them and load the HTML file into IE, I get just the names as links. If I load the HTML file into Word, the URLs are there, but surrounded by garbage.

posted by KRS to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

You can do a search-and-replace in Word to strip out the "garbage" code. Such as:

If the code looks like this (replace [ with <> and ] with >):

[a href="http://www.google.com"]Google[/a]

Do a find for [a href=" and replace it with " (nothing)

Do a find for "] and replace it with ", " (comma, space)

Do a find for [/a] and replace it with "" (nothing)

And you would end up with: http://www.google.com, Google
posted by nitsuj at 1:24 PM on December 15, 2009

If you open the html file into excel, import with the delimiter as : (the colon symbol) it will open in an excel spreadsheet. THere will be other garbage in it, but the first string in column B will be the URL's you are looking for. If you want to isolate them a little better, highlight column B, then do data>text to columns, and set the delimiter as ". Then your URL's will be in column B by themselves.
posted by 8dot3 at 1:38 PM on December 15, 2009

Another approach would be to manipulate the favourites directly, they are just text files.

Copy them all into one folder and then combine at the command line:

Copy *.url PART1.TXT
find "URL=" PART1.TXT >PART2.TXT
find /v "BASEURL=" PART2.TXT >FINAL.TXT

Then open FINAL.txt and print
posted by Lanark at 2:47 PM on December 15, 2009

The reason it looks like garbage in Word is because the bookmarks file is just an HTML fragment. To fix it, open the .htm file in a text editor and add to the top of the file and to the end of the file.

After that Word will render the HTML properly, but you'll still be stuck with the same thing you see in the browser (link names but no URLs). You would then need to do Right-Click...Edit Hyperlink...and copy paste the URL into the document for each link.
posted by VanCityChica at 2:52 PM on December 15, 2009

Ugh, looks like the element tags got filtered out of my last message. It's supposed to read:

add the html open tag to the top of the file and the html close tag to the end of the file.
posted by VanCityChica at 2:55 PM on December 15, 2009

Export to bookmarks.htm, as you have already done.

Open the file with Internet Explorer.

Go the Print dialog (Ctrl+P, "Print..." under the File menu, or "Print..." under the dropdown from the Print button.)

Switch to the Options tab and check the "Print table of links" option.

Press Print.

Unfortunately, the table of links will follow after the document, and there is no way to prevent the document itself from printing unless you use something like FinePrint.
posted by Nameless at 10:59 PM on December 16, 2009