parser VS to-markdown

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

https://mixmark-io.github.io/turndown/

With some configuration you can get most of the way there.

// Original script // https://gist.github.com/kepano/90c05f162c37cf730abb8ff027987ca3 // Bookmarklet Converter // https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ // Libraries // https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown // https://github.com/mozilla/readability javascript: Promise.all([import('https://unpkg.com/[email protected]?module'), import('https://unpkg.com/@tehshrike/[email protected]'), ]).then(async ([{ default: Turndown }, { default: Readability }]) => { /* Optional vault name */ const vault = ""; /* Optional folder name such as "Clippings/" */ const folder = "Clippings/"; /* Optional tags */ const tags = ""; function getSelectionHtml() { var html = ""; if (typeof window.getSelection != "undefined") { var sel = window.getSelection(); if (sel.rangeCount) { var container = document.createElement("div"); for (var i = 0, len = sel.rangeCount; i < len; ++i) { container.appendChild(sel.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents()); } html = container.innerHTML; } } else if (typeof document.selection != "undefined") { if (document.selection.type == "Text") { html = document.selection.createRange().htmlText; } } return html; } const selection = getSelectionHtml(); const { title, byline, content } = new Readability(document.cloneNode(true)).parse(); function getFileName(fileName) { var userAgent = window.navigator.userAgent, platform = window.navigator.platform, windowsPlatforms = ['Win32', 'Win64', 'Windows', 'WinCE']; if (windowsPlatforms.indexOf(platform) !== -1) { fileName = fileName.replace(':', '').replace(/[/\\?%*|"<>]/g, '-'); } else { fileName = fileName.replace(':', '').replace(/\//g, '-').replace(/\\/g, '-'); } return fileName; } const fileName = getFileName(title); if (selection) { var markdownify = selection; } else { var markdownify = content; } if (vault) { var vaultName = '&vault=' + encodeURIComponent(`${vault}`); } else { var vaultName = ''; } const markdownBody = new Turndown({ headingStyle: 'atx', hr: '---', bulletListMarker: '-', codeBlockStyle: 'fenced', emDelimiter: '*', }).turndown(markdownify); var date = new Date(); function convertDate(date) { var yyyy = date.getFullYear().toString(); var mm = (date.getMonth()+1).toString(); var dd = date.getDate().toString(); var mmChars = mm.split(''); var ddChars = dd.split(''); return yyyy + '-' + (mmChars[1]?mm:"0"+mmChars[0]) + '-' + (ddChars[1]?dd:"0"+ddChars[0]); } const today = convertDate(date); // This is the output template // It is similar to an Obsidian core template // except to insert a value we use: ${value} instead of {{value}} const fileContent =`--- type: clipping date_added: ${today} aliases: [] tags: [${tags}] --- author:: ${byline.toString().split('\n')[0].trim()} source:: [${title}](${document.URL}) ${markdownBody} `; // This copies your text to the clipboard navigator.clipboard.writeText(fileContent); // This creates a new document in Obsidian containing your clipping // I commented it out as this isn't what you asked for /* document.location.href = "obsidian://new?" + "file=" + encodeURIComponent(folder + fileName) + "&content=" + encodeURIComponent(fileContent) + vaultName; */ })

turndown [MIT] https://mixmark-io.github.io/turndown/

Have a look at turndown: https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/