Help:Linksearch

is one of the special pages which searches for external links. It provides a list of links in external link style that match the given URL pattern. For each link the page in which it is found is listed, along with the exact target of the link on that page.

The URL pattern can be:

In the input box "http://" is allowed but not needed.

In the URL of the special page where the search string contains an anchor, or the first part of an anchor name, the hash character # has to be coded as "%23" and the required style is

In each of the styles

This special page's functionality can also be accessed through the using

For links in external link style, Linksearch provides backlinks of sections, which "Special:Whatlinkshere" does not for links in internal link style. For links in style there is no backlink feature at all.

On the other hand, links in internal link style provide existence detection. Also each of the three styles can have a different look, depending on CSS.

Since Linksearch allows specifying the first part of an anchor, it is useful, if anchor names are numerical or have a numerical end, to use leading zeros. Otherwise, when searching for links to e.g. "1", we also get links to "10", etc. This is e.g. applied in . More generally, if there are anchors "a" and "ab", it may or may not be desired that a search for links to "a" also gives links to "ab"; if not, use an anchor "_a".

Also, if anchor names have multiple components, it is useful to put the most significant component first, e.g. if anchors indicate months or dates, we could have the format YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD, or in a year page MM-DD (see also Calendar date#Big endian forms, starting with the year), with leading zeros (see also Help:Date formatting and linking#Link to date content other than required for autoformatting). This applies also for page names, but since these are highly visible, as opposed to anchors, other considerations play a role too. In the case of sections, if for link targets another naming scheme is desired than for display of section headers, anchorscan be put explicitly instead of using section names. This is applied in {{}}, where the use in links of the names of explicitly put anchors is enforced by using pseudo sections, with displayed headers that cannot be used as anchors.

In the case of multiple sections with the same name, the HTML produced has an HTML ID that is the section name, with, from the second occurrence, "_2", "_3", etc. appended. This does not apply when other anchors are used.

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