mgdm/htmlq

---

mgdm/htmlq.json

{
  "createdAt": "2019-05-07T20:55:20Z",
  "defaultBranch": "master",
  "description": "Like jq, but for HTML.",
  "fullName": "mgdm/htmlq",
  "homepage": null,
  "language": "Rust",
  "name": "htmlq",
  "pushedAt": "2024-05-29T03:40:49Z",
  "stargazersCount": 7449,
  "topics": [],
  "updatedAt": "2025-11-24T08:17:59Z",
  "url": "https://github.com/mgdm/htmlq"
}

htmlq

Like jq, but for HTML. Uses CSS selectors to extract bits of content from HTML files.

Installation

Cargo

cargo install htmlq

FreeBSD pkg

pkg install htmlq

Homebrew

brew install htmlq

Scoop

scoop install htmlq

Usage

$ htmlq -h
htmlq 0.4.0
Michael Maclean <michael@mgdm.net>
Runs CSS selectors on HTML

USAGE:
    htmlq [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [--] [selector]...

FLAGS:
    -B, --detect-base          Try to detect the base URL from the <base> tag in the document. If not found, default to
                               the value of --base, if supplied
    -h, --help                 Prints help information
    -w, --ignore-whitespace    When printing text nodes, ignore those that consist entirely of whitespace
    -p, --pretty               Pretty-print the serialised output
    -t, --text                 Output only the contents of text nodes inside selected elements
    -V, --version              Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -a, --attribute <attribute>         Only return this attribute (if present) from selected elements
    -b, --base <base>                   Use this URL as the base for links
    -f, --filename <FILE>               The input file. Defaults to stdin
    -o, --output <FILE>                 The output file. Defaults to stdout
    -r, --remove-nodes <SELECTOR>...    Remove nodes matching this expression before output. May be specified multiple
                                        times

ARGS:
    <selector>...    The CSS expression to select [default: html]
$

Examples

Using with cURL to find part of a page by ID

$ curl --silent https://www.rust-lang.org/ | htmlq '#get-help'
<div class="four columns mt3 mt0-l" id="get-help">
        <h4>Get help!</h4>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org">Documentation</a></li>
          <li><a href="https://users.rust-lang.org">Ask a Question on the Users Forum</a></li>
          <li><a href="http://ping.rust-lang.org">Check Website Status</a></li>
        </ul>
        <div class="languages">
            <label class="hidden" for="language-footer">Language</label>
            <select id="language-footer">
                <option title="English (US)" value="en-US">English (en-US)</option>
<option title="French" value="fr">Français (fr)</option>
<option title="German" value="de">Deutsch (de)</option>

            </select>
        </div>
      </div>

Find all the links in a page

$ curl --silent https://www.rust-lang.org/ | htmlq --attribute href a
/
/tools/install
/learn
/tools
/governance
/community
https://blog.rust-lang.org/
/learn/get-started
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/25/Rust-1.34.1.html
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/12/06/Rust-1.31-and-rust-2018.html
[...]

Get the text content of a post

$ curl --silent https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html | htmlq  --text .main

          About NixOS

NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution that aims to
improve the state of the art in system configuration management.  In
existing distributions, actions such as upgrades are dangerous:
upgrading a package can cause other packages to break, upgrading an
entire system is much less reliable than reinstalling from scratch,
you can’t safely test what the results of a configuration change will
be, you cannot easily undo changes to the system, and so on.  We want
to change that.  NixOS has many innovative features:

[...]

Remove a node before output

There’s a big SVG image in this page that I don’t need, so here’s how to remove it.

$ curl --silent https://nixos.org/ | ./target/debug/htmlq '.whynix' --remove-nodes svg
<ul class="whynix">
      <li>

        <h2>Reproducible</h2>
        <p>
          Nix builds packages in isolation from each other. This ensures that they
          are reproducible and don't have undeclared dependencies, so <strong>if a
            package works on one machine, it will also work on another</strong>.
        </p>
      </li>
      <li>

        <h2>Declarative</h2>
        <p>
          Nix makes it <strong>trivial to share development and build
            environments</strong> for your projects, regardless of what programming
          languages and tools you’re using.
        </p>
      </li>
      <li>

        <h2>Reliable</h2>
        <p>
          Nix ensures that installing or upgrading one package <strong>cannot
            break other packages</strong>. It allows you to <strong>roll back to
            previous versions</strong>, and ensures that no package is in an
          inconsistent state during an upgrade.
        </p>
      </li>
    </ul>

Pretty print HTML

(This is a bit of a work in progress)

$ curl --silent https://mgdm.net | htmlq --pretty '#posts'
<section id="posts">
  <h2>I write about...
  </h2>
  <ul class="post-list">
    <li>
      <time datetime="2019-04-29 00:%i:1556496000" pubdate="">
        29/04/2019</time><a href="/weblog/nettop/">
        <h3>Debugging network connections on macOS with nettop
        </h3></a>
      <p>Using nettop to find out what network connections a program is trying to make.
      </p>
    </li>
[...]

Syntax highlighting with bat

$ curl --silent example.com | htmlq 'body' | bat --language html