tq is command line utility that performs an HTML element selection on HTML content passed to the stdin. Using css selectors that everybody knows.

Since input comes from stdin and output is sent to stdout, it can easily be used inside traditional UNIX pipelines to extract content from webpages and html files.

tq provides extra formating options such as json-encoding or newlines squashing, so it can play nicely with everyones favourite command line tooling.

sudo pip3 install https://github.com/plainas/tq/zipball/stable

Get headlines from hacker news

curl https://news.ycombinator.com/news | tq -tj ".title a"

Get the title of an html document stored in a file

cat mydocument.html | tq -t title

Get all the images from a webpage

curl -s 'http://example.com/' | tq  "img" -a src | wget -i -

Notice that tq doesn't provide a way to make http requests or read files. You can use your favorite HTTP client, or provide the html source from any source you want.

For a modern, user friendly http client, check httpie. Or you can just use curl, wget, netcat, etc.

• SELECTOR A css selector

• -a ATTRIBUTE --attr=ATTRIBUTE Outputs only the contents of the html ATTRIBUTE.

• -t, --text Outputs only the inner text of the selected elements.

• -p, --parent Select the parent elements instead.

• -q, --squash Squash lines.

• -s, --squash-space Squash spaces.

• -j, --json-lines JSON encode each match.

• -J, --json Output as json array of strings.

• -v, --version Prints tq version