URL Cleaner

Websites often put unique identifiers into URLs so that when you send a link to a friend and they open it, the website knows it was you who sent it to them.
As most people do not understand and therefore cannot consent to this, it is polite to remove the maltext before sending URLs to people.
URL Cleaner is an extremely versatile tool designed to make this process as comprehensive, easy, and fast as possible.

Privacy

Redirect sites

The main privacy concern when using URL Cleaner for day-to-day activities is the fact URL Cleaner, when the no-network flag isn't set, expands redirects/shortlinks.
For example, passing a bit.ly link to URL Cleaner will effectively click on that URL will send an HTTP request to bit.ly.
While the default config removes as much tracking stuff as possible before sending the request, some redirect sites may merge the sender and the destination information into the same part of the URL.
For example, if Alice and Bob share the same social media post with you, the social media may give Alice the URL https://example.com/share/1234 but give Bob the URL https://example.com/share/5678.
In this case, it's impossible (or extremely difficult to find a way) to expand either link without telling the social media who you got the URL from.

In general it's impossible to prove if a redirect website doesn't merge sender and destination information, so one should always assume it is.
If you consider this a problem, please use the no-network flag.
Some redirect websites will still be handled but that's only because they can be done entirely offline.

You look like you use URL Cleaner

The lesser main privacy concern is that the default config makes no attempt to hide from websites that you (or the person sending you a link) uses URL Cleaner.
For example, amazon product listings are shortened from a paragraph of crap to just https://amazon.com/dp/PRODUCT-ID.
In the past (and possibly the future), extreme cases of this were gated behind a minimize flag that would try to only remove tracking stuff.
It was made the default because I consider the benefit from blending into other URL cleaning programs extremely slim.

C dependencies

These packages are required on Kubuntu 2024.04 (and therefore probably all Debian based distros.):

• libssl-dev for the http feature flag.
• libsqlite3-dev for the caching feature flag.

There are likely plenty more dependencies required that various Linux distros may or may not pre-install.

If you can't compile it I'll try to help you out. And if you can make it work on your own please let me know so I can add to this list.

Basic usage

By default, compiling URL Cleaner includes the default-config.json file in the binary. Because of this, URL Cleaner can be used simply with url-cleaner "https://example.com/of?a=dirty#url".

Additionally, URL Cleaner can take jobs from STDIN lines. cat urls.txt | url-cleaner works by printing each result on the same line as its input.

See Parsing output for details on the output format, and yes JSON output is supported.

The default config

The default config is intended to always obey the following rules:

• "Meaningful semantic changes"^{[definition?]} from the input URL and output URL should only ever occur as a result of a flag being enabled.
  • Insignificant details like the item categories navbar on amazon listings being slightly different are insignificant.
• URLs that are "semantically valid"^{[definition?]} shouldn't ever return an error.
  • URLs that aren't semantically valid also shouldn't ever throw an error but that is generally less important.
  • URLs that are semantically invalid may become semantically valid if there is an obvious way to do so. See the unmangle flag for details.
• Outside of long (>10)/infinite redirects, it should always be idempotent.
• Outside of redirect sites changing behavior, network connectivity issues, or other similarly difficult things to guarantee determinism for, it should always be deterministic.
• The command and custom features, as well as any features starting with debug or experiment are never expected to be enabled. The command feature is enabled by default for convenience but, for situations where untrusted/user-provided configs have a chance to be run, should be disabled.
• It is acceptable for websites to be able to tell a URL has been cleaned, and even for it to know it was URL Cleaner specifically.
  • Blending in with other URL cleaning solutions is not considered a priority.
  • For URL Cleaner Site, this extends to websites knowing they're being tampered with.

Currently no guarantees are made, though when the above rules are broken it is considered a bug and I'd appreciate being told about it.

Additionally, these rules may be changed at any time for any reason. Usually just for clarification.

Flags

• breezewiki: Replace fandom/known Breezewiki hosts with the breezewiki-host variable.
• unbreezewiki: Replace Breezewiki hosts with fandom.com.
• nitter: Replace twitter/known Nitter hosts with the nitter-host variable.
• unnitter: Replace Nitter hosts with x.com.
• invidious: Replace youtube/known Invidious hosts with the invidious-host variabel.
• uninvidious: Replace Invidious hosts with youtube.com
• embed-compatibility: Sets the domain of twitter domiains (and supported twitter redirects like vxtwitter.com) to the variable twitter-embed-host and bsky.app to the variable bsky-embed-host.
• discord-unexternal: Replace images-ext-1.discordapp.net with the original images they refer to.
• assume-1-dot-2-is-redirect: Treat all hosts that match the Regex ^.\...$ as redirects. Let's be real, they all are.
• bypass.vip: Use bypass.vip to expand linkvertise and some other links.
• no-https-upgrade: Disable replacing http:// with https://.
• no-network: Don't make any HTTP requests.
• no-unmangle-host-is-http-or-https: Don't convert https://https//example.com/abc to https://example.com/abc.
• no-unmangle-path-is-url: Don't convert https://example1.com/https://example2.com/user to https://example2.com/abc.
• no-unmangle-path-is-url-encoded-url: Don't convert https://example.com/https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fuser to https://example.com/user.
• no-unmangle-second-path-segment-is-url: Don't convert https://example1.com/profile/https://example2.com/profile/user to https://example2.com/profile/user.
• no-unmangle-subdomain-ends-in-reg-domain: Don't convert https://profile.example.com.example.com to https://profile.example.com.
• no-unmangle-subdomain-starting-with-www-segment: Don't convert https://www.username.example.com to https://username.example.com.
• no-unmangle-twitter-first-path-segment-is-twitter-domain: If a twitter domain's first path segment is a twitter domain, don't remove it.
• onion-location: Replace hosts with results from the Onion-Location HTTP header if present. This makes an HTTP request one time per domain and caches it.
• tor2web: Append the suffix specified by the tor2web-suffix variable to .onion domains.
• tor2web2tor: Replace **.onion.** domains with **.onion domains.
• tumblr-unsubdomain-blog: Changes blog.tumblr.com URLs to tumblr.com/blog URLs. Doesn't move at or www subdomains.
• unmangle: "Unmangle" certain "invalid but I know what you mean" URLs. Should not be used with untrusted URLs as malicious actors can use this to sneak malicuous URLs past, for example, email spam filters.
• unmobile: Convert https://m.example.com, https://mobile.example.com, https://abc.m.example.com, and https://abc.mobile.example.com into https://example.com and https://abc.example.com.
• youtube-unlive: Turns https://youtube.com/live/abc into https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc.
• youtube-unplaylist: Removes the list query parameter from https://youtube.com/watch URLs.
• youtube-unshort: Turns https://youtube.com/shorts/abc into https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc.
• youtube-unembed: Turns https://youtube.com/embed/abc into https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc.
• remove-unused-search-query: Remove search queries from URLs that aren't search results (for example, posts).
• instagram-unprofilecard: Turns https://instagram.com/username/profilecard into https://instagram.com/username.
• keep-lang: Keeps language query parameters.

Vars

• breezewiki-host: The domain to replace fandom/Breezewiki domains with when the breezewiki flag is enabled
• nitter-host: The domain to replace twitter/nitter domains with when the nitter flag is enabled
• invidious-host: The domain to replace twitter/Invidious domains with when the invidious flag is enabled
• twitter-embed-host: The domain to use for twitter when the embed-compatibility flag is set. Defaults to vxtwitter.com.
• bluesky-embed-host: The domain to use for bluesky when the embed-compatibility flag is set. Defaults to fxbsky.com.
• bypass.vip-api-key: The API key used for bypass.vip's premium backend. Overrides the URL_CLEANER_BYPASS_VIP_API_KEY environment variable.
• tor2web-suffix: The suffix to append to the end of .onion domains if the flag tor2web is enabled. Should not start with . as that's added automatically. Left unset by default.

Environment Vars

• URL_CLEANER_BYPASS_VIP_API_KEY: The API key used for bypass.vip's premium backend. Can be overridden with the bypass.vip-api-key variable.

Sets

• bypass.vip-host-without-www-dot-prefixes: The HostWithoutWWWDotPrefixes of websites bypass.vip can expand.
• email-link-format-1-hosts: (TEMPORARY NAME) Hosts that use unknown link format 1.
• https-upgrade-host-blacklist: Hosts to never upgrade from http to https.
• redirect-host-without-www-dot-prefixes: Hosts that are considered redirects in the sense that they return HTTP 3xx status codes. URLs with hosts in this set (as well as URLs with hosts that are "www." then a host in this set) will have the ExpandRedirect mapper applied.
• redirect-reg-domains: The redirect-host-without-www-dot-prefixes set but using the RegDomain of the URL.
• remove-empty-fragment-reg-domain-blacklist: The RegDomains to not remove an empty fragment (the #stuff at the end (but specifically just a #)) from.
• remove-empty-query-reg-domain-blacklist: The RegDomains to not remove an empty query from.
• remove-www-subdomain-reg-domain-blacklist: RegDomains where a www Subdomain is important and thus won't have it removed.
• unmangle-path-is-url-blacklist: Effectively the no-unmangle-path-is-url flag for the specified Hosts.
• unmangle-subdomain-ends-in-reg-domain-reg-domain-blacklist: Effectively the no-unmangle-subdomain-ends-in-reg-domain-reg-domain-blacklist flag for the specified RegDomains.
• unmangle-subdomain-starting-with-www-segment-reg-domain-blacklist: Effectively the no-unmangle-subdomain-starting-with-www-segment flag for the specified RegDomains.
• unmobile-reg-domain-blacklist: Effectively unsets the unmobile flag for the specified RegDomains.
• utps: The set of "universal tracking parameters" that are always removed for any URL with a host not in the utp-host-whitelist set. Please note that the utps common mapper in the default config also removes any parameter starting with any string in the utp-prefixes list and thus parameters starting with those can be omitted from this set.
• utps-reg-domain-whitelist: RegDomains to never remove universal tracking parameters from.

Lists

• utp-prefixes: If a query parameter starts with any of the strings in this list (such as utm_) it is removed.

Maps

• hwwwwdp_lang_query_params: The name of the HostWithoutWWWDotPrefix's language query parameter.

Named Partitionings

• hwwwwdp_categories: Categories of similar websites with shared cleaning methods.

Job Context

Vars

• redirect_shortcut: For links that use redirect sites but have the final URL in the link's text/title/whatever, this is used to avoid sending that HTTP request.
• site_name: For furaffinity contact info links, the name of the website the contact info is for. Used for unmangling.
• link_text: The text of the link the job came from.

Jobs Context

Vars

• SOURCE_REG_DOMAIN: The RegDomain of the "source" of the jobs. Usually the webpage it came from.
• SOURCE_URL: The URL of the "source" of the jobs. Usually the webpage it came from.

But how fast is it?

Reasonably fast. benchmarking/benchmark.sh is a Bash script that runs some Hyperfine and Valgrind benchmarking so I can reliably check for regressions.

On a mostly stock lenovo thinkpad T460S (Intel i5-6300U (4) @ 3.000GHz) running Kubuntu 24.10 (kernel 6.11.0) that has "not much" going on (FireFox, Steam, etc. are closed), hyperfine gives me the following benchmark:

Last updated 2025-03-09.

Also the numbers are in milliseconds.

{
  "https://x.com?a=2": {
    "0"    :  7.383,
    "1"    :  7.478,
    "10"   :  7.485,
    "100"  :  7.840,
    "1000" : 10.115,
    "10000": 32.909
  },
  "https://example.com?fb_action_ids&mc_eid&ml_subscriber_hash&oft_ck&s_cid&unicorn_click_id": {
    "0"    :  7.380,
    "1"    :  7.451,
    "10"   :  7.549,
    "100"  :  7.872,
    "1000" : 11.211,
    "10000": 45.314
  },
  "https://www.amazon.ca/UGREEN-Charger-Compact-Adapter-MacBook/dp/B0C6DX66TN/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2CNEQ7A6QR5NM&keywords=ugreen&qid=1704364659&sprefix=ugreen%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-5&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.b06bdbbe-20fd-4ebc-88cf-fa04f1ca0da8": {
    "0"    :  7.378,
    "1"    :  7.391,
    "10"   :  7.614,
    "100"  :  8.530,
    "1000" : 12.563,
    "10000": 60.176
  }
}

For reasons not yet known to me, everything from an Intel i5-8500 (6) @ 4.100GHz to an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D (32) @ 5.759GHz seems to max out at between 140 and 110ms per 100k (not a typo) of the amazon URL despite the second CPU being significantly more powerful.

In practice, when using URL Cleaner Site and its userscript, performance is significantly (but not severely) worse.
Often the first few cleanings will take a few hundred milliseconds each because the page is still loading.
However, because of the overhead of using HTTP (even if it's just to localhost) subsequent cleanings, for me, are basically always at least 10ms.

Credits

The people and projects I have stolen various parts of the default config from.

• Mozilla Firefox's Extended Tracking Protection's query stripping
• Brave Browser's query filter
• AdGuard's Tracking Parameters Filter
• FastForward

MSRV

The Minimum Supported Rust Version is the latest stable release. URL Cleaner may or may not work on older versions, but there's no guarantee.

Untrusted input

Although URL Cleaner has various feature flags that can be disabled at compile time to make handling untrusted input safer, no guarantees are made. Especially if the config file being used is untrusted.
That said, if you notice any rules that use but don't actually need HTTP requests or other data-leaky features, please let me know.

CLI

Parsing output

Note: JSON output is supported.

Unless a Debug variant is used, the following should always be true:

1. Input URLs are a list of URLs starting with URLs provided as command line arguments then each line of the STDIN.
2. The nth line of STDOUT corresponds to the nth input URL.
3. If the nth line of STDOUT is empty, then something about reading/parsing/cleaning the URL failed.
4. The nth non-empty line of STDERR corresponds to the nth empty line of STDOUT.
   1. Currently empty STDERR lines are not printed when a URL succeeds. While it would make parsing the output easier it would cause visual clutter on terminals. While this will likely never change by default, parsers should be sure to follow 4 strictly in case this is added as an option.

JSON output

The --json/-j flag can be used to have URL Cleaner output JSON instead of lines.

The exact format is currently in flux, though it should always be identical to URL Cleaner Site's output.

Exit code

Currently, the exit code is determined by the following rules:

• If no cleanings work and none fail, returns 0. This only applies if no URLs are provided.
• If no cleanings work and some fail, returns 1.
• If some cleanings work and none fail, returns 0.
• If some cleanings work and some fail, returns 2. This only applies if multiple URLs are provided.

Panic policy

URL Cleaner should only ever panic under the following circumstances:

• Parsing the CLI arguments failed.
• Loading/parsing the config failed.
• Printing the config failed. (Shouldn't be possible.)
• Testing the config failed.
• Reading from/writing to STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR has a catastrophic error.
• Running out of memory resulting in a standard library function/method panicking. This should be extremely rare.
• (Only possible when the debug feature is enabled) The mutex controlling debug printing indenting is poisoned and a lock is attempted. This should only be possible when URL Cleaner is used as a library.

Outside of these cases, URL Cleaner should never panic. However as this is equivalent to saying "URL Cleaner has no bugs", no actual guarantees can be made.

Funding

URL Cleaner does not accept donations. If you feel the need to donate please instead donate to The Tor Project and/or The Internet Archive.