Web Connector 25.4
Web Connector Help

# Retrieve Information using a URL File

This section describes how to retrieve content from the Web by providing the connector with a list of URLs. When you provide a list of URLs (a URL file), the connector does not follow links to other pages.

Providing a list of URLs is usually impractical for a large site, but you might want to do this if you have an external process generating the URLs. You must create a text file that contains the URLs of the pages to ingest, with one URL on each line.

You can update the URL file without changing the connector's configuration. If a URL is removed from the file, the connector sends an ingest-delete for that page on the next synchronize cycle.

To create a new Fetch Task

1. Stop the connector.
2. Open the configuration file in a text editor.

3. In the `[FetchTasks]` section of the configuration file, specify the number of fetch tasks using the `Number` parameter. If you are configuring the first fetch task, type `Number=1`. If one or more fetch tasks have already been configured, increase the value of the `Number` parameter by one (1). Below the `Number` parameter, specify the names of the fetch tasks, starting from zero (0). For example:

       [FetchTasks]
       Number=1
       0=MyTask

4. Below the `[FetchTasks]` section, create a new TaskName section. The name of the section must match the name of the new fetch task. For example:

       [FetchTasks]
       Number=1
       0=MyTask

       [MyTask]

1. In the new section, set the following parameters:

   `SitemapFile` | The path to a plain text file that contains a list of URLs of pages to ingest. The file must contain one URL on each line.
   `UrlCantHaveRegex` | (Optional) A Perl-compatible regular expression to restrict the content retrieved by the connector. If the full URL of a page matches the regular expression, the page is not ingested. You can set this parameter to filter the list of URLs.
   `UrlMustHaveRegex` | (Optional) A Perl-compatible regular expression to restrict the content retrieved by the connector. The full URL of a page must match the regular expression, otherwise the page is not ingested. You can set this parameter to filter the list of URLs.

   For example:

       [MyTask]
       SitemapFile=my-list-of-urls.txt
       RemoveNoscripts=TRUE
       RemoveScripts=TRUE
       SynchronizeThreads=5
       PageDelay=5s

   For a complete list of configuration parameters that you can use, refer to the Web Connector Reference.

2. (Optional) If the connector is installed on a machine that is behind a proxy server, see Retrieve Information through a Proxy Server.

3. Save and close the configuration file.

Related Topics

- Schedule Fetch Tasks

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Version 25.4 | Last updated October 2025

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Product: Knowledge Discovery Web Connector 25.4

Topic Title: Retrieve Information using a URL File