Template:URL

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This template can be used to create a formatted external link. It formats the appearance of displayed URLs, while making them machine-readable as part of emitted microformat meta-data, inside templates such as infoboxes.

If you wish to display text instead of the URL (e.g. "website" instead of example.com), please do not use this template. Instead, consider using normal wiki markup, Template:Plain link, or Template:Official website. Displaying text instead of the url will render the microformat data invalid.

For web-based references, please see Wikipedia:Citation templates

Usage

• {{URL|example.com}}
  • The first parameter is parsed to see if it takes the form of a complete URL. If it doesn't start with a URI scheme (such as "http:", "https:", or "ftp:"), an "http://" prefix will be prepended to the specified generated target URL of the link.
  • Parameter 2 ({{URL|url name|optional display text}}) is deprecated. See note above for more information and alternative templates.

Warning: The parameter 1 must be numbered explicitly ({{URL|1=example.com}}) if the URL contains an equal sign, as is common in a query string. This applies when the value of the URL is unknown, for example when this template is used in another template specifying the effective URL as a variable value. The deprecated second parameter for the displayed text, if present in legacy uses, must also be explicitly numbered if the first parameter is explicitly numbered ({{URL|1=url name|2=optional display text}}); otherwise it will override the value of the first parameter.

Examples

Code	Result
{{ URL | EXAMPLE.com }}	example.com
{{ URL | example.com }}	example.com
{{ URL | http://example.com }}	example.com
{{ URL | www.example.com }}	www.example.com
{{ URL | http://www.example.com }}	www.example.com
{{ URL | https://www.example.com }}	www.example.com
{{ URL | ftp://www.example.com }}	www.example.com
{{ URL | ftp://ftp.example.com }}	ftp.example.com
{{ URL | http://www.example.com/ }}	www.example.com
{{ URL | http://www.example.com/path }}	www.example.com/path
{{ URL | irc://irc.example.com/channel }}	irc.example.com/channel
{{ URL | www.example.com/foo }}	www.example.com/foo
{{ URL | http://www.example.com/path/ }}	www.example.com/path/
{{ URL | www.example.com/foo/ }}	www.example.com/foo/
{{ URL | 1=http://www.example.com/path?section=17 }}	www.example.com/path?section=17
{{ URL | 1=www.example.com/foo?page=42 }}	www.example.com/foo?page=42
{{ URL | www.example.com | example.com }}	example.com

Microformat

The template wraps the displayed URL with a class="url" so that it is included in any parent microformat which takes a URL parameter - see our microformats project.

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData documentation for this template used by VisualEditor and other tools.

See the monthly error report for this template.

TemplateData for URL

A template to display and format a URL, inside other tempates

Template parameters

Parameter		Description	Type	Status
URL	1	The URL to be linked Default empty Example empty Auto value empty	String	required
Display text	2	The text to be displayed instead of the URL. Deprecated Default empty Example empty Auto value empty	String	deprecated

See also

• {{Official URL}}
• {{Official website}}
• {{Plain link}}