What you need to do is to create a URL object for each URL, and then either create and read from a URLConnection for each, or just get an InputStream from the URL. If you are unable to get an InputStream, or if you cannot read anything from the stream, or if what yo are reading specifies a 404 (Found) or 500 (Internal Server) eror, then you have a broken link. You can then add the URL (either the object or the string) to the vector.