PLEASE HELP>>> Understanding anchor link syntax

a href link syntax

[miketheman]

I've been working on a crawl script that pulls all links on a page. I can successfully obtain the link value with my script, but to properly format the results. I need to better understand anchor (href) syntax.

what I've concluded so far are:
1. http or https -> direct link to another page (GOOD)
2. mailto:, javascript:, #, -> browser interactivity (IGNORE)
3. / -> site base (GOOD)

the issues arise when my crawler is on a page link:
html://www.example.com/folder/thisone.html

and link result is:
search.php?some=value

I think a refresher of how browsers properly format links to get them to their target would very much help me. PLEASE ANYONE, been working on this for 2 days now. Cant find anything through google for anchor or link syntax and structures.

[swa66]

If you want the real knowledge of how a URL needs to be parsed:
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3986.txt
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1738.txt

your 1. is wrong in the sense that it must start with http:// or https://

There are far more possibilities and when writing a parser to put in a bot: it needs to understand them all.

Hence fall back onto the BNF syntax in the RFCs.