What does HackerNews think of xidel?
Command line tool to download and extract data from HTML/XML pages or JSON-APIs, using CSS, XPath 3.0, XQuery 3.0, JSONiq or pattern matching. It can also create new or transformed XML/HTML/JSON documents.
Language:
Pascal
#32
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Command line interface
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Command line interface
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HTML
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HTTP
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JSON
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REST API
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XML
Xidel for XPath on JSON, XML, and HTML: https://github.com/benibela/xidel
> Well, jq is grep as well as sed and awk, but yeah, htmlq seems to be just grep, for sake of comparison.
Exactly, and that is what I mean. If you want to compare, compare it with grep, not jq.
Someone else posted xidel[0] in this thread, which I've not used, but it seems to be the "jq but for html".
It's not novel obviously. I have been using pup[1] for years. And xidel[2] is probably older.
This looks very useful, big fan of all the ^[a-z]+q$ utilities out there. But as a user, I would probably want to use XPath[0] notation here. Maybe that is just me. A quick search revealed xidel[1] which seems to be similar, but supports XPath.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath [1]https://github.com/benibela/xidel
I generally use xidel [1] for that type of task. Feed it xpath, css selectors or its own pattern matching thing.