Bookmarks Checker

Identify dead links in Firefox and Chrome bookmarks.

Background

So many browser bookmarks – there are 1,900 URLs in my bookmarks. And in just one year, 120 of those URLs ceased to exist.

A simple PHP prototype script provided a slow way (~1 URL per second) of checking for dead links.

I switched to Python to leverage its threading capabilities and speed up the process. Then I finally got round to adding cURL multi to the PHP script.

Example

$ php bookmarks_checker.php

1883 links being checked ...

error | https://www.nxytimes.com/ | 0 | 4.999007 | nxytimes
<...>

See generated logfile bookmarks_checker.log
URL parse time: 177.642 s

95 links failed
1788 links verified

Scripts

• Python 3
• Python 2
• PHP and cURL

Usage

Export browser bookmarks.

The scripts by default will attempt to load a file in the same directory called bookmarks.html An alternative filename can be specified on the command-line.

The scripts parse the file and try to access each URL, printing a list of URLs that cannot be accessed (which will intermittently include a false positive).

Python

    python3 bookmarks_checker.py

    python bookmarks_checker_py2.py

(or make the file executable and run directly e.g. ./bookmarks_checker.py)

Switches

-h or --help displays help text.

-f <file> allows an alternatively-named file to be loaded instead of the default bookmarks.html

PHP

    php bookmarks_checker.php [file]

Exporting Browser Bookmarks <a id="export"></a>

Firefox

Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Export Bookmarks to HTML

Chrome

Access Chrome's Bookmark Manager with:

<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> + <kbd>Shift</kbd> + <kbd>O</kbd>

or

chrome://bookmarks/

then click Organize > Export bookmarks to HTML file ...

Other

Python Scripts

Setting DEBUG = True will show all URLs as access is attempted, and either the successful response or the failure error message.

Credits

Doug Hellmann, jfs, and philshem for threading pools in Python.

License

Scripts are released under the GPL v.3.