Export Link Validation

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MarandaMiller
Community Novice
Tuesday

I have over 150 links that were returned as broken links via the link validator.  I'd like to export the listing into a spreadsheet so that I can track what was fixed.

Is there an option in exporting the list rather than me copying/paste in a spreadsheet or document?

 

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James
Community Champion
Tuesday

@MarandaMiller 

What I normally do is work my way through the list and then re-run the validator after I have fixed a bunch of stuff. Since you can click on the title, I normally go through and ctrl-click several of those to open in a new tab and then I close the tab once I've made the changes. Most people will find it easier to work this way than to work from a spreadsheet, especially since those 150 broken links could be across just 10 pages and you'll fix all the items on one page at a time. It goes faster than you might think when seeing the initial 150 warnings.

 

That said, if you really want a list in a spreadsheet, you can scrape the web page and extract the links.

I quickly threw something together that would generate a tab-separated list of all of the information from the link validator. You can then copy/paste it into a spreadsheet. It wouldn't take much to make a userscript out of this that actually creates a spreadsheet, but I don't have the time to fully debug or support it right now and I haven't seen a lot of demand for something like this.

The script gives you columns for the item (page, assignment, etc.) title, the link to the Canvas item, the type of item, the message, the link that is problematic, and the text of the link. It handles the cases where items have multiple types of messages (thanks go to one of my unnamed colleagues for having a page with 25 broken links).

These directions are for Chrome, but the script should work in all major browsers.

  1. Navigate to your link validation page with the results you want to export.
  2. Press F12 to open the browser's developer tools. You can also right-click on the page and choose Inspect.
  3. Find the Console tab. There is a link at the top for Console, but there may be one at the bottom of other pages such as Elements.
  4. Paste the code into the console and hit enter.
  5. Select the output and copy/paste into a spreadsheet.
var info = [['title','url','type','message','link','linkUrl']];
document.querySelectorAll('#all-results div.result').forEach(r => {
  const headEl = r.querySelector('h2');
  const headLink = headEl.querySelector('a');
  const typeEl = headEl.parentNode.querySelector('span');
  const messagesEl = r.querySelector('ul');
  const title = headLink.textContent;
  const titleUrl = headLink.href;
  const type = typeEl.textContent;
  for (const m of messagesEl.children) {
    if (!m.nodeName === 'LI') {
      continue;
    }
    const messageFullText = m.textContent;
    const itemsEl = m.querySelector('ul');
    const partialText = itemsEl.textContent;
    const messageText = messageFullText.slice(0,messageFullText.length-partialText.length);
    itemsEl.querySelectorAll('li a').forEach(e => {
      console.log(e);
      const link = e.href;
      const linkText = e.textContent;
      const item = [title, titleUrl, type, messageText, link, linkText];
      info.push(item);
    });
  }
});
console.log(info.map(e => e.join('\t')).join('\n'));

 

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