fq VS pup

I feel like `fq` has a query path language that's kind of generic across lots of file types. It can be fairly verbose for that reason. I was using it to debug MsgPack documents and it was a lot less intuitive than just using some dotted string paths with `jq`.

https://github.com/wader/fq/

Hey! fq author here. I have a bunch of related tools in the readme https://github.com/wader/fq?tab=readme-ov-file#tools two suggestions: gnu poke and wireshark (can decode lots of more things then just network protocol)

Did someone say let's represent structured data as json? a bit of shameless plug: https://github.com/wader/fq :) It's using a fork of gojq btw!

https://github.com/wader/fq has a REPL and can read JSON. Tip is to use "paste | from_json | repl" in a REPl to paste JSON into a sub-REPL, you can also use `` with fq which is a raw string literal

I do lots of exploratory work in various structure data, in my case often debugging media filea via https://github.com/wader/fq, which mean doing lots of use-once-queries on the command line or REPL. In those cases jq line-friendly and composable syntax and generators really shine.

And lnk=$(curl -s https://www.selfstudys.com$url |grep "PDFFlip" | cut -d '"' -f 6) to lnk=$(curl -s https://www.selfstudys.com$url | pup "div#PDFF attr{source}" ) here pup will print content of source attribute from div tag with id PDFF i dont know that much about html & css so this is what i came up with. but i am sure you can also select class & make list of suburls from them. check out the video from bugswriter on pup or read docs from git hub for more info github link: https://github.com/ericchiang/pup

jq is pretty amazing. If you are comfortable with its jquery-like CSS selector syntax, then I should also mention a couple similar cli utilities that apply it to HTML: htmlp and pup.

Regex is not a great tool for parsing web pages. Open up a browser dev tools window and select a bit of the page. Right click > copy... XPath expression or CSS selector. A proper web scraping tool will accept either of those. No muss, no fuss. You can even use simple command line tools: xpath or pup

This is HTML to JSON, written in Rust, and there's also pup[1] which I found out about just the other day on HN[2] which uses a very similar syntax (CSS selectors) but outputs HTML and is written in Go.

I can see room for both though it would interesting to have a more detailed comparison to go on (e.g. types of HTML, speed etc).

[1] https://github.com/ericchiang/pup

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33805732

It looks like the project became inactive for a bit and there are alternatives such as htmlq, etc. https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/issues/150

Another tool worth mentioning is pup - it can produce JSON output which means you can pipe it to jq