Readability4J VS dragnet

Depending upon the type of content, one might want to look into using the Readability (Browder's reader view) to parse the webpage. It will give you all the useful info without the junk. Then you can put it in the DB as needed.

https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Btw, readability, is also available in few other languages like Kotlin:

https://github.com/dankito/Readability4J

My Hacker News client HACK for iOS and Android has a reader mode ability browser. While on iOS, I was able to use the reader mode feature provided by SFSafariViewController, that wasn't available on android.

So I had to read a ton about this. I ended up using a heavily modified Kotlin version of Readability:

https://github.com/dankito/Readability4J

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1464477788

Not sure about OP but I just implemented this in my Hacker News android client (thanks for the idea OP).

This is how I implemented it. I had already achieved article to "reader mode" by heavily customizing the Kotlin port of Mozilla‘s Readability:

https://github.com/dankito/Readability4J

Then I pass the text via Android's TextToSpeech library and it works very well:

    fun trySpeaking(str:String){

I’ve had good luck with dragnet in the past for extracting content from html: https://github.com/dragnet-org/dragnet

I am trying to work on a Python tool which makes use of Dragnet as a dependency. After quite a bit of issues I think I am starting to get a better picture that Dragnet will not be very easy to work with. The GitHub page says it was built for Python 2.7 “with recent support for Python 3”. The repo hasn’t been updated in 12 months; many of the other updates are from 3-4 years ago. A normal pip installation is not working. Their Issues page is full from posts from one year ago about various installation problems.

It's really nice that browsers offer reader modes, but they are frustratingly incomplete.

Really, let's switch to a user perspective once and consider - what if I always want reader mode? This is technologically complete impossible and all the solutions are a band-aid.

Firefox and others' attempts rely on the page authors' goodwill. But some pages will always attempt to frustrate reader modes.

Alternative approaches for content extraction use machine learning such as [1], but they of course need to be updated for culture- language- and technology-specific changes.

It's a mess and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

[1] https://github.com/dragnet-org/dragnet

You can take a look into how dragnet preprocess html block ( the Blockifier function ), it's certainly not the best since it collapse the tree structure into one sequential flow but I think is easier to work with once you know how to modify the code for your own need. While the hard way is use lxml and write the parsing yourself, which is also what's happening under dragnet.