pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors.
Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal.
Direct downloads are available through the releases page.
If you have Go installed on your computer just run go get.
go get github.com/ericchiang/pup
If you're on OS X, use Homebrew to install (no Go required).
brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EricChiang/pup/master/pup.rb
$ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/Ew, HTML. Let's run that through some pup selectors:
$ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a'Okay, how about only the links?
$ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a attr{href}'Even better, let's grab the titles too:
$ curl -s https://news.ycombinator.com/ | pup 'table table tr:nth-last-of-type(n+2) td.title a json{}'$ cat index.html | pup [flags] '[selectors] [display function]'Download a webpage with wget.
$ wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard -O robots.htmlBy default pup will fill in missing tags and properly indent the page.
$ cat robots.html
# nasty looking HTML
$ cat robots.html | pup --color
# cleaned, indented, and colorful HTML$ cat robots.html | pup 'title'
<title>
Robots exclusion standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
</title>$ cat robots.html | pup 'span#See_also'
<span class="mw-headline" id="See_also">
See also
</span>$ cat robots.html | pup 'th[scope="row"]'
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Exclusion standards
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Related marketing topics
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Search marketing related topics
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Search engine spam
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Linking
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
People
</th>
<th scope="row" class="navbox-group">
Other
</th>CSS selectors have a group of specifiers called "pseudo classes" which are pretty cool. pup implements a majority of the relevant ones them.
Here are some examples.
$ cat robots.html | pup 'a[rel]:empty'
<a rel="license" href="//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" style="display:none;">
</a>$ cat robots.html | pup ':contains("History")'
<span class="toctext">
History
</span>
<span class="mw-headline" id="History">
History
</span>$ cat robots.html | pup ':parent-of([action="edit"])'
<span class="wb-langlinks-edit wb-langlinks-link">
<a action="edit" href="//www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q80776#sitelinks-wikipedia" text="Edit links" title="Edit interlanguage links" class="wbc-editpage">
Edit links
</a>
</span>For a complete list, view the implemented selectors section.
These are intermediate characters that declare special instructions. For
instance, a comma , allows pup to specify multiple groups of selectors.
$ cat robots.html | pup 'title, h1 span[dir="auto"]'
<title>
Robots exclusion standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
</title>
<span dir="auto">
Robots exclusion standard
</span>When combining selectors, the HTML nodes selected by the previous selector will be passed to the next ones.
$ cat robots.html | pup 'h1#firstHeading'
<h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading" lang="en">
<span dir="auto">
Robots exclusion standard
</span>
</h1>$ cat robots.html | pup 'h1#firstHeading span'
<span dir="auto">
Robots exclusion standard
</span>For further examples of these selectors head over to MDN.
pup '.class'
pup '#id'
pup 'element'
pup 'selector + selector'
pup 'selector > selector'
pup '[attribute]'
pup '[attribute="value"]'
pup '[attribute*="value"]'
pup '[attribute~="value"]'
pup '[attribute^="value"]'
pup '[attribute$="value"]'
pup ':empty'
pup ':first-child'
pup ':first-of-type'
pup ':last-child'
pup ':last-of-type'
pup ':only-child'
pup ':only-of-type'
pup ':contains("text")'
pup ':nth-child(n)'
pup ':nth-of-type(n)'
pup ':nth-last-child(n)'
pup ':nth-last-of-type(n)'
pup ':not(selector)'
pup ':parent-of(selector)'You can mix and match selectors as you wish.
cat index.html | pup 'element#id[attribute="value"]:first-of-type'Non-HTML selectors which effect the output type are implemented as functions which can be provided as a final argument.
Print all text from selected nodes and children in depth first order.
$ cat robots.html | pup '.mw-headline text{}'
History
About the standard
Disadvantages
Alternatives
Examples
Nonstandard extensions
Crawl-delay directive
Allow directive
Sitemap
Host
Universal "*" match
Meta tags and headers
See also
References
External linksPrint the values of all attributes with a given key from all selected nodes.
$ cat robots.html | pup '.catlinks div attr{id}'
mw-normal-catlinks
mw-hidden-catlinksPrint HTML as JSON.
$ cat robots.html | pup 'div#p-namespaces a'
<a href="/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard" title="View the content page [c]" accesskey="c">
Article
</a>
<a href="/wiki/Talk:Robots_exclusion_standard" title="Discussion about the content page [t]" accesskey="t">
Talk
</a>$ cat robots.html | pup 'div#p-namespaces a json{}'
[
{
"accesskey": "c",
"href": "/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard",
"tag": "a",
"text": "Article",
"title": "View the content page [c]"
},
{
"accesskey": "t",
"href": "/wiki/Talk:Robots_exclusion_standard",
"tag": "a",
"text": "Talk",
"title": "Discussion about the content page [t]"
}
]Use the -i / --indent flag to control the intent level.
$ cat robots.html | pup -i 4 'div#p-namespaces a json{}'
[
{
"accesskey": "c",
"href": "/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard",
"tag": "a",
"text": "Article",
"title": "View the content page [c]"
},
{
"accesskey": "t",
"href": "/wiki/Talk:Robots_exclusion_standard",
"tag": "a",
"text": "Talk",
"title": "Discussion about the content page [t]"
}
]If the selectors only return one element the results will be printed as a JSON object, not a list.
$ cat robots.html | pup --indent 4 'title json{}'
{
"tag": "title",
"text": "Robots exclusion standard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
}Because there is no universal standard for converting HTML/XML to JSON, a method has been chosen which hopefully fits. The goal is simply to get the output of pup into a more consumable format.
Run pup --help for a list of further options