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

  • {{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.

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

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.

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. See a monthly parameter usage report for Template:URL in articles based on its TemplateData.

TemplateData for URL

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

Template parameters

ಪರಿಮಿತಿವಿವರನಮೂನೆಸ್ಥಾನಮಾನ
URL1

The URL to be linked

Stringrequired
Display text2

The text to be displayed instead of the URL. Deprecated

Stringdeprecated