README - webdump - HTML to plain-text converter for webpages
(HTM) git clone git://git.codemadness.org/webdump
(DIR) Log
(DIR) Files
(DIR) Refs
(DIR) README
(DIR) LICENSE
---
README (3219B)
---
1 webdump
2 -------
3
4 HTML to plain-text converter tool.
5
6 It reads HTML in UTF-8 from stdin and writes plain-text to stdout.
7
8
9 Build and install
10 -----------------
11
12 $ make
13 # make install
14
15
16 Dependencies
17 ------------
18
19 - C compiler.
20 - libc + some BSDisms.
21
22
23 Usage
24 -----
25
26 Example:
27
28 url='https://codemadness.org/sfeed.html'
29
30 curl -s "$url" | webdump -r -b "$url" | less
31
32 curl -s "$url" | webdump -8 -a -i -l -r -b "$url" | less -R
33
34 curl -s "$url" | webdump -s 'main' -8 -a -i -l -r -b "$url" | less -R
35
36
37 Yes, all these option flags look ugly, a shellscript wrapper could be used :)
38
39
40 Goals / scope
41 -------------
42
43 The main goal is to use it for converting HTML mails to plain-text and to
44 convert HTML content in RSS feeds to plain-text.
45
46 The tool will only convert HTML to stdout, similarly to links -dump or lynx
47 -dump but simpler and more secure.
48
49 - HTML and XHTML will be supported.
50 - There will be some workarounds and quirks for broken and legacy HTML code.
51 - It will be usable and secure for reading HTML from mails and RSS/Atom feeds.
52 - No remote resources which are part of the HTML will be downloaded:
53 images, video, audio, etc. But these may be visible as a link reference.
54 - Data will be written to stdout. Intended for plain-text or a text terminal.
55 - No support for Javascript, CSS, frame rendering or form processing.
56 - No HTTP or network protocol handling: HTML data is read from stdin.
57 - Listings for references and some options to extract them in a list that is
58 usable for scripting. Some references are: link anchors, images, audio, video,
59 HTML (i)frames, etc.
60
61
62 Features
63 --------
64
65 - Support for word-wrapping.
66 - A mode to enable basic markup: bold, underline, italic and blink ;)
67 - Indentation of headers, paragraphs, pre and list items.
68 - Basic support to query an element or hide them.
69 - Show link references.
70 - Show link references and resources such as img, video, audio, subtitles.
71 - Export link references and resources to a TAB-separated format.
72
73
74 Trade-offs
75 ----------
76
77 All software has trade-offs.
78
79 webdump processes HTML in a single-pass. It does not buffer the full DOM tree.
80 Although due to the nature of HTML/XML some parts like attributes need to be
81 buffered.
82
83 Rendering tables in webdump is very limited. Twibright Links has really nice
84 table rendering. Implementing a similar feature in the current design of
85 webdump would make the code much more complex however. Twibright links
86 processes a full DOM tree and processes the tables in multiple passes (to
87 measure the table cells) etc. Of course tables can be nested also, or is used
88 in (older web) pages that use HTML tables for layout.
89
90 These trade-offs and preferences are chosen for now. It may change in the
91 future. Fortunately there are the usual good suspects for HTML to plain-text
92 conversion, (each with their own chosen trade-offs of course):
93
94 For example:
95
96 - twibright links
97 - lynx
98 - w3m
99
100
101 Examples
102 --------
103
104 To use webdump as a HTML to text filter for example in the mutt mail client,
105 change in ~/.mailcap:
106
107 text/html; webdump -i -l -r < %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput
108
109 In mutt you should then add:
110
111 auto_view text/html
112
113
114 License
115 -------
116
117 ISC, see LICENSE file.
118
119
120 Author
121 ------
122
123 Hiltjo Posthuma <hiltjo@codemadness.org>