Creating External URL Links in Javadoc

How to Link to an External URL in Javadoc

The Javadoc documentation tool can be used to generate HTML documentation for your Java projects. One of Javadoc’s features is to automatically create hyperlinks for URLs in the javadoc comment. This makes it a breeze to link to external resources such as websites and documents.

To link to an external URL in javadoc you have to use an HTML anchor tag (a tag) in your comment. The syntax looks like this:

<a href="http://example.com">Description of the resource</a>

The "href" attribute holds the URL of the linked web page and the content between the opening and closing tags will be displayed as the link text. If you leave the "href" empty, the link text will also be used as the URL for the link.

In addition to the anchor tag, you can also use the @link command in your Javadoc comment to create a link to an external URL. The syntax looks like this:

{@link http://example.com Description of the resource}

This is the recommended way to link to external resources in Javadoc comments, as it is simpler and more readable than using an anchor tag. The description of the resource is optional and can be omitted if desired.

By using the techniques described above, you can easily link to external websites and documents from your Javadoc comments to provide further information and details about the code being documented.