article-to-md

A CLI tool to extract core content from webpages or local HTML and convert it to Markdown.

Usage: article-to-md [OPTIONS] SOURCE

Convert an article or web page to Markdown.

Commands:
  --help, -h: Display this message and exit.
  --version: Display application version.

Parameters:
  SOURCE, --source: A URL or local HTML file to process. [required]
  --method: The extraction engine to use. [choices: readability, trafilatura, raw] [default: readability]
  --favor: Whether to favor 'precision' or 'recall' when using trafilatura. [choices: recall, precision]
  --remove-ads, --no-remove-ads: Apply EasyList cosmetic filters to remove ads before processing. [default: False]
  --strip-tag, --no-strip: HTML tag to strip from the final output. Repeat this flag to remove multiple tags. Use --no-strip to disable. [default: ('img',)]

Installation

uv is recommended to install the package in a managed environment:

uv tool install article-to-md

Note: To use the readability method, Node.js (v14+) must be installed on your system. Without Node.js, the tool uses Python-based extraction.

Usage

From a publicly accessible web page:

article-to-md https://example.com/article

From a local HTML file:

article-to-md /path/to/file.html

Advanced options:

• --remove-ads - Basic ad removal from the DOM using generic cosmetic filters from EasyList
• --method - Affects pre-processing of the DOM before conversion to Markdown.
  • readability (default) - Uses ReadabiliPy which can use the original Readability.js Node package when Node is present on the system.
  • trafilatura - Uses the Trafilatura pure Python library
  • raw - Sends the full DOM to be converted
• --favor - Only used with --method trafilatura to control options documented here.
• --strip-tag - An HTML tag to be stripped from the DOM before conversion
  • This argument can be supplied multiple times
  • By default, <img> tags are stripped; use --no-strip to keep them.

Features

• Stealth Requests: Uses curl_cffi to impersonate a Chrome browser and avoid bot detection.
• Enhanced Markdown:
  • Converts <var> to italics.
  • Includes <abbr> titles in the text output.
  • Renders Markdown tables from HTML tables