Xidel

Xidel is a command line tool to download and extract data from HTML/XML pages using CSS selectors, XPath/XQuery 3.0, as well as querying JSON files or APIs (e.g. REST) using JSONiq.

There are dependency-free binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac.

It is a wrapper around my Pascal Internet Tools (see repository internettools), so it supports XPath 2.0, XPath 3.0, XQuery 1.0, XQuery 3.0, JSONiq, CSS selectors and my own extensions/languages (e.g. pattern matching) and if you can compile that project, you can compile Xidel.

A simple example to return the titles of all pages linked by some starting page:

 xidel http://example.org --follow //a --extract //title
 

or simpler

 xidel http://example.org -f //a -e //title
 

The language can be explicitly chosen. For example

 xidel input.html --css 'a'
 xidel input.html --xpath '//a/@href'
 xidel input.html --xquery 'for $var in //a order by $var return $var'

returns all links, the target URI of each link or the text of all links alphabetically.

There are more examples on the above page with binaries, the github wiki and in the directory examples.

Screenshots

Compilation and Installation

You can compile it by calling build.sh and install it by calling build.sh -t. Alternatively you can compile it with the Lazarus IDE.

You can call the commands from the .travis.yml script to download dependencies.