readability-cli/readability-cli.1.md

readability-cli(1) -- get useful text from a web page

SYNOPSYS

readable [SOURCE] [options]...

DESCRIPTION

readability-cli takes any HTML page and strips out unnecessary bloat, leaving only the core text content. The resulting HTML may be suitable for terminal browsers, text readers, and other uses.

This package provides the readable command, which uses Mozilla's Readability library. The same library is used in Firefox's Reader View.

The SOURCE can be a URL, a file, or '-' for standard input.

OPTIONS

--help

• Show help message, and exit.

-b, --base URL

• Specify the document's URL. This affects relative links: they will not work if readability-cli does not know the base URL. You only need this option if you read HTML from a local file, or from standard input.

-S, --insane

• Don't sanitize HTML.

-K, --insecure

• (Node.js version only) Allow invalid SSL certificates.

-j, --json

• Output all known properties of the document as JSON (see Properties subsection).

-l, --low-confidence MODE

• What to do if Readability is uncertain about what the core content actually is. The possible modes are:

  • keep - When unsure, don't touch the HTML, output as-is.
  • force - Process the document even when unsure (may produce really bad output).
  • exit - When unsure, exit with an error.

• The default value is keep. If the --properties or --json options are set, the program will always run in exit mode.

-C, --keep-classes

• Preserve CSS classes for input elements. By default, CSS classes are stripped, and the input is adapted for Firefox's Reader View.

-o, --output FILE

• Output the result to FILE.

-p, --properties PROPERTIES...

• Output specific properties of the document (see Properties subsection).

-x, --proxy URL

• (Node.js version only) Use specified proxy. Node.js and Deno can also use HTTPS_PROXY environment variable.

-q, --quiet

• Don't print extra information.

-s, --style

• Specify .css file for stylesheet.

-A, --user-agent STRING

• Set custom user agent string.

-V, --version

• Print readability-cli and Node.js/Deno version, then exit.

--completion

• Print script for shell completion, and exit. Provides Zsh completion if the current shell is zsh, otherwise provides Bash completion. Currently broken when using Deno.

Properties

The --properties option accepts a list of values, separated by spaces. Suitable values are:

• title - The title of the article.
• html-title - The title of the article, wrapped in an <h1> tag.
• excerpt - Article description, or short excerpt from the content.
• byline - Data about the page's author.
• length - Length of the article in characters.
• dir - Text direction, is either "ltr" for left-to-right or "rtl" for right-to-left.
• text-content - Output the article's main content as plain text.
• html-content - Output the article's main content as an HTML body.

Properties are printed line by line, in the order specified by the user. Only "text-content" and "html-content" is printed as multiple lines.

EXIT STATUS

As usual, exit code 0 indicates success, and anything other than 0 is an error. readability-cli uses standard* error codes:

Error code	Meaning
64	Bad CLI arguments
65	Data format error: can't parse document using Readability.
66	No such file
68	Host not found
69	URL inaccessible
77	Permission denied: can't read file

* By "standard error codes" I mean "close to a standard". And by that I mean: I don't remember any command line tools which actually use this convention. You may find more info in sysexits(3), or maybe just sysexits.h.

ENVIRONMENT

readability-cli supports localization, using the environment variables LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, LANG and LANGUAGE, in that order. Only one language at a time is supported.

HTTPS_PROXY will set the HTTPS proxy, as previously stated, however the --proxy option overrides this. Node.js also recognizes lowercase https_proxy and http_proxy, for compatibility with curl.

EXAMPLE

Read HTML from a file and output the result to the console:

readable index.html

Fetch a random Wikipedia article, get its title and an excerpt:

readable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random -p title,excerpt

Fetch a web page and read it in W3M:

readable https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html | w3m -T text/html

Download a web page using cURL, parse it and output as JSON:

curl https://github.com/mozilla/readability | readable --base=https://github.com/mozilla/readability --json

SEE ALSO

curl(1), w3m(1), sysexits(3)

Source code, license, bug tracker and merge requests may be found on GitLab.