Template:URL/doc

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 or Template:Official website. Displaying text instead of the url will render the microformat data invalid.

For web-based references, please see Citation templates.

Usage

 * 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 is deprecated. See note above for more information and alternative templates.
 * Parameter 2 is deprecated. See note above for more information and alternative templates.

URL with = character requires numbered parameters
If the URL contains an equals sign, as is common in a query string, the parameter 1 must be used for the URL. 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 ; otherwise it will override the value of the first parameter.

Examples
To the right of each example is the displayed output. Below each example is the actual output including and   tags.

Microformat
The template wraps the displayed URL with a  so that it is included in any parent microformat which takes a URL parameter - see our microformats project.

TemplateData
{	"description": "A template to display and format a URL, inside other tempates", "params": { "1": {			"label": "URL", "description": "The URL to be linked", "type": "string", "required": true },		"2": {			"label": "Display text", "description": "The text to be displayed instead of the URL. Deprecated", "type": "string", "required": false, "deprecated": true }	} }