parselcli is a command line interface and interactive shell for parsel package for evaluating css and xpath selectors in real time against web urls or local html files.
Parsel is a library to extract data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors
Main goal of this tool is to ease document parser development (usually in the context of web-scraping).
- Supports
cssandxpathselector expressions either. - Prompt Toolkit powered interactive shell with autocomplete, hints, vi mode etc.
- Playwright powered browser based rendering
- Click powered unix CLI (with pipe support)
- Cache support for repeated usage.
- Extensive and instant text processing via text processor flags.
- User configs
~/.config/parsel.toml
Parselcli can be installed through pip:
$ pip install --user parselcli
# optional: for --browser flag support optional dependency is required:
$ pip install --user "parselcli[browser]"
# optional: for better --embed install ipython:
$ pip install --user ipython
Note that --browser flag is using Playwright optional dependency which needs Chromium web browser to work. If --browser flag doesn't work ensure the browser is installed via playwright install chromium command.
Calling command parsel with any http url will drop terminal into prompt.
In the prompt css and xpath selector can be entered together with commands and processing options
$ parsel "https://github.com/granitosaurus/parsel-cli"
# help command is always there to show available commands and processor flags
> help
Commands:
--help print help
--reset reset session processors
--embed embed repl
--info show context info
--css switch to css input
--xpath switch to xpath input
--open open current url in web browser
--view open current doc in web browser
--vi toggle input to/from vi mode
--fetch request new url
Processors:
--first, -1 take only 1st value
--pretty, -p pretty format html
--slice, -[ take slice
--re filter values by regex or if capture groups are present return them
--sum sum all values if possible
--repr, -r represent output (e.g. show newline chars)
--len, -l return total length
--strip, -s strip away trailing chars
--absolute, -a turn relative urls to absolute ones
--collapse, -c collapse single element lists
--join, -j join results
--join-with, -J join results with specified character
-n take n-th element
# css selector support
> h1::text
['\n ', '\n ', '\n ', '\n ', '\n\n ', '\n', 'About parselcli']
# css selectors with inline processors
> h1::text --join --strip
About parselcli
# or short form inline processors
> h1::text -js
About parselcli
# or session processors
> --join --strip
active processors: [Join(' '), Strip]
> h1::text
About parselcli
# switching to xpath
> --xpath
switched to xpath
> //h1/text()
About parselcli
For usage recipes, see recipes.md documentations.
Usage: parsel [OPTIONS] URL
Interactive shell for css and xpath selectors
Options:
-h TEXT request headers, e.g. -h "user-agent=cat
bot"
--xpath start in xpath mode instead of css
--browser use browser emulator
--browser-headless use headless browser emulator
--browser-wait [load|domcontentloaded|networkidle|none]
wait for browser page to reach some state
--browser-wait-css TEXT wait for browser page to render until css
selector appears
--browser-wait-xpath TEXT wait for browser page to render until xpath
selector appears
-c TEXT compile css and return it
-x TEXT compile xpath and return it
-i TEXT initial input
--cache cache requests
--no-color disable html output colors
--vi-mode enable vi-mode for input
--config TEXT config file [default:
/home/dex/.config/parsel.toml]
--embed start in embedded python shell
-v verbosity level
--shell [ipython|ptpython|bpython|python]
preferred embedded shell; default auto
resolve in order
--help Show this message and exit.
parselcli reads XML or HTML file from url or disk and starts interpreter for xpath or css selectors.
By default it starts in css interpreter mode but can be switched to xpath by -xpath command and switched back with -css.
parselcli supports processors and commands in shell for advance usage:
$ parsel "https://github.com/granitosaurus/parsel-cli"
> --help
Commands:
--help print help
--embed embed repl
--info show context info
--css switch to css input
--xpath siwtch to xpath input
--open open current url in web browser
--view open current doc in web browser
--fetch request new url
Processors:
--first, -1 take only 1st value
--len, -l return total length
--strip, -s strip away trailing chars
--absolute, -a turn relative urls to absolute ones
--collapse, -c collapse single element lists
--join, -j join results
--join-with, -J join results with specified character
-n <number> take n-th element
Commands can be called at any point in the prompter:
> --fetch "http://some-other-url.com"
requesting "http://some-other-url.com"
> --view
opening document in browser
Processor options can be either activated for specific prompt (inline processors):
> h1::text --first
# will take first element
Or can be set for current session (session processors):
> --first
default processors: [First]
# will process every following command with new processors
parselcli can be configured via toml configuration file found in $XDG_HOME/parsel.toml (usually ~/.config/parsel.toml):
# input on parsel launch - usually used to enable session processors
initial_input = [ "--collapse --strip"]
# whether input coloring is enabled
color = True
# whether input is in vi mode
vi_mode = False
# where prompt toolkit history is located
history_file_css = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_css"
history_file_xpath = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_xpath"
history_file_embed = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_embed"
[requests]
# when using --cache flag for using cached responses
cache_expire = 86400
# where sqlite cache file is stored for cache
cache_file = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/requests.cache"
[requests.headers]
# here headers can be defined for requests to avoid bot detection etc.
User-Agent = "parselcli web inspector"
# e.g. chrome on windows use
# User-Agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36"
Currently the project is somewhat unstable as I wrote this for myself - minor versions are very likely to break API! PRs, suggestions, issues etc. are welcome!
For debugging see -vv flag and for info logs see -v flag.
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