A Command Line Interface for HTML With parsel-cli

There are many great command line tools for searching and manipulating text (like grep), columnar data (like awk), JSON data (like jq). With HTML there’s parsel-cli built on top of the wonderful parsel Python library.

Parsel is a fantastic library that gives a simple and powerful interface for extracting data from HTML documents using CSS selectors, Xpath and regular expressions. Parsel-cli is a very small utility that lets you use parsel from the command line (and can be installed with pip install parsel-cli).

For example if you wanted to extract all links from a HTML document; you could use parsel-cli 'a::attr(href)' You could also use it to extract particular useful data from a website without an API; for example to get the headlines from Hacker News you can use curl -q https://news.ycombinator.com/ | parsel-cli '.storylink::text' While it’s limited compared to actually writing scripts with parsel (especially only being able to extract one field), it’s a useful companion for transforming data in shell.