Readability4J VS parser

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){

Thoroughly scraping is challenging, especially in an environment where you don’t have (or want) a JavaScript runtime.

For content extraction, I found the approach the Postlight library takes quite neat. It scores individual html nodes based on some heuristics (text length, link density, css classes). It the selects the nodes with the highest score. [1] I ported it to Swift for a personal read later app.

[1] https://github.com/postlight/parser

I've been working on an enhanced reader mode extension for the last few months. I found that Mercury Reader's parser tool is useful for extracting content. If that's not exactly what you're looking for, readibility is another good option. It's a library used inside Firefox's reader moder that you can use in any project.

I currently have it turned off while I search for better sources, but I have a VM that runs a custom cron script that combines a custom RSS reader, podfox, mercury-parser, and coqui-ai to generate audio podcasts from RSS news feeds. I should probably clean it up and release the script/setup process. With a few tweaks and some AI text-to-speech and a little machine learning audio processing you can get a really good podcast experience from text posts.

It looks like Relay could be updated to convert it locally though, since the parser that it uses appears to be open source.

https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser The only one I need, shit's too good

An alternative would be to extract the plain text from the article's page with either some "readability" API or a library like Mercury Parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser

I haven’t directly compared them, but I have also found mercury parser (https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser) to be very reliable.

Since it turns a website into very plain (X)HTML it‘s fairly easy to use it to make a browsing proxy or automatically produce epub files for e-readers, which is what I do.

Make sure that at the end of the process you have the node and npm executables installed - the http.webpage integration uses the Mercury Parser API to convert web pages to Markdown.

Good luck! Those HTML issues you're coming across are tough and so varied across the web!

I was working with Mercury Parser (pluggable parsing for different sites) in the past.

https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser