readability-cli/README.md

reader-view-cli

Firefox Reader View in your terminal!

reader-view-cli takes any HTML page and strips out unnecessary bloat by using Mozilla's Readability library. As a result, you get a web page which contains only the core content and nothing more. The resulting HTML is suitable for terminal browsers, text readers, or perhaps other use-cases.

An example of Reader View in Firefox:

Standard view in Firefox

Reader View in Firefox

An example of reader-view-cli with W3M browser:

Standard view in W3M

reader-view-cli + W3M

Usage

readable [SOURCE] [options] readable [options] -- [SOURCE] (where SOURCE is a file, an http(s) URL, or '-' for standard input)

Options:

	    --help                 Print help
	-o  --output OUTPUT_FILE   Output to OUTPUT_FILE
	-p  --properties PROPS...  Output specific properties of the parsed article
	-V  --version              Print version
	-u  --url                  Set the document URL when parsing standard input or a local file (this affects relative links and such)
	-U  --is-url               Interpret SOURCE as a URL rather than file name
	-q  --quiet                Don't output extra information to stderr

The --properties option accepts a comma-separated list of values (with no spaces in-between). Suitable values are:

	html-title     Outputs the article's title, wrapped in an <h1> tag.
	title          Outputs the title in the format "Title: $TITLE".
	excerpt        Article description, or short excerpt from the content, in the format "Excerpt: $EXCERPT"
	byline         Author metadata, in the format "Author: $AUTHOR"
	length         Length of the article in characters, in the format "Length: $LENGTH"
	dir            Content direction, is either "Direction: ltr" or "Direction: rtl"
	html-content   Outputs the article's main content as HTML.
	text-content   Outputs the article's main content as plain text.

Text-content and Html-content are mutually exclusive, and are always printed last. Default value is "html-title,html-content".

Usage examples

Read HTML from a file and output the result to the console: readable index.html

Fetch a web page and read it in W3M: readable https://example.com/page | w3m -T text/html

Download a web page using cURL, get the title, the content, and an excerpt in plain text: curl https://example.com/page | readable --url https://example.com/page -p title,excerpt,text-content

It's a good idea to supply the --url parameter when piping input, otherwise readable won't know the document's URL, and things like relative links won't work.