Markdown Reference Link Converter

How to use

1. 1Pick the direction: Inline to reference converts [text](url) to [text][id] with a definitions block; Reference to inline does the reverse.
2. 2Choose the reference id style for inline-to-reference: Numeric ids ([1], [2], ...) match the GitHub release-notes convention; Text ids slugify the link text so the definitions block reads like a glossary.
3. 3Toggle Dedupe by URL to reuse a single id when the same URL appears in several places. Toggle Include images to also rewrite .
4. 4Paste your Markdown into the input on the left. The converted Markdown appears on the right and updates as you type.
5. 5Open the Diagnostics panel for orphaned references, unused definitions, and empty-URL warnings, and the definitions table to copy individual reference lines or the whole block.
6. 6Use Swap direction to feed the result back as input, useful for sanity-checking a round trip, or Load sample to see a worked example before pasting your own document.

About this tool

Markdown Reference Link Converter switches Markdown documents between the two link styles the spec defines: inline links written as [text](url "title") and reference links written as [text][id] with a [id]: url "title" definition somewhere in the file. The inline-to-reference direction is the one most writers reach for when a long-form post, a release note, a wiki page, or a README has accumulated so many embedded URLs that the prose has become hard to skim. The converter walks the document once, skips fenced code blocks (``` and ~~~), inline code spans, and HTML comment blocks so links inside those regions stay byte-for-byte identical, then collects every inline link and every inline image and rewrites them into [text][id] (or ![alt][id]) with a definitions block placed at the bottom of the document or right after the first paragraph. Reference ids can be numeric ([1], [2], [3] in source order) or text-based (slugified from the link text, with -2, -3, suffixes for collisions). When the same URL appears in several inline links the dedupe-by-URL option reuses a single id so the definitions block stays compact and a future URL change can be made in one place. The reference-to-inline direction reads every [text][id], [text][] collapsed reference, and shortcut reference [text] whose label matches a defined id, looks up the matching [id]: url "title" definition (case-insensitive, the way CommonMark requires), inlines the destination back into the body, and strips the no-longer-needed definitions block. Titles are preserved in both directions and re-quoted with the safer quote character when the title itself contains a quote. The diagnostics panel reports orphaned references whose ids do not match any definition, definitions that are not used anywhere in the body, and inline links with an empty URL so a final pass can tidy the document. The link table lists every reference id, URL, and title so a reviewer can copy a single definition line or the whole block. Everything is local: the parser is a small browser-only tokenizer, no markdown library is loaded, and the Markdown you paste here is never uploaded.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.