Normally if we type an URL in Asciidoctor that starts with a scheme Asciidoctor knows about, the URL is turned into a hyperlink. The following schemes are recognized by Asciidoctor:

If we want to keep our URL as text and not a link we must prepend our URL with a backslash (\). This way Asciidoctor will not transform the URL to a hyperlink in our output.

In the following example we have URL that is transformed to a link, followed by the same URL but with a backslash (\) before it, that is not transformed:

== URL not as a link

The URL https://ift.tt/2i6Rp1o  should
be turned into a hyperlink.

But now the URL \https://ift.tt/2i6Rp1o should
just be text and not a hyperlink.

If we transform our document to HTML with Asciidoctor we get the following result:

Written with Asciidoctor 1.5.6.1.

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