You can parse the buffer, and run some code on all of the links. I did something like this here http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2013/09/28/Changing-links-to-files-so-they-work-in-a-blog/ for another reason. You could adapt that to do your link validation. I guess you will need to send a request to the url to see if it is valid.

John

-----------------------------------
John Kitchin
Associate Professor
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 10:23 PM, Grant Rettke <gcr@wisdomandwonder.com> wrote:

Hi,

One of my documents has ~200 HTML links in the footnotes.

Wondering how folks check the links?

My goal is that:
1. Each footnote with a URL is evaluated
2. They are evaluated to determine whether the URL is valid
3. Check whether or not the page exists
4. Add some indicate in the footnote that it was found not to be up on
some date.

This might require some custom coding, no?

Regards,

Grant Rettke | AAAS, ACM, AMA, COG, FSF, IEEE, Sigma Xi
grettke@acm.org | http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” --Socrates
((λ (x) (x x)) (λ (x) (x x)))
“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop
taking it seriously.” --Thompson