Markout

A small Python package I made to extract HTML content from web pages. It is very customizable and I made it to fit my needs (extract multiple pages' code to Markdown, but only some HTML tags which I needed). Due to its purpose being able to convert specific HTML tags into a desired Markdown format this script does not generate any standard output, rather, it uses custom tokens specified in a configuration file, so the output can be formatted into any anything.

Usage

Importing into your code

To use this package you'll need to install it using pip:

pip install markout-html

Then just import it into your code:

from markout_html import *

After that you can use the extract_url and extract_html functions:

result = extract_url(
  # HTML page link
  'http://example.page.com/blog/some_post.html',

  # Tokens to format each HTML tags contents (you can extract only the ones you want)
  {
    'p': "\n** {} **"
  },

  # Only extract contents inside this tag
  'article'
)

result = extract_html(
  # HTML code string
  '<html>some html code</html>',

  # Tokens to format each HTML tags contents (you can extract only the ones you want)
  {
    'p': "\n** {} **"
  },

  # Only extract contents inside this tag
  'article'
)

Using the CLI command

Below are a few examples with better description on how to use this package command if you don't want to create a Python script!

If you just want to extract using a string in the terminal, you can use markout_html --extract [string].

You can use the command markout_html with the flag --help for more info.

Configuration

All configurations can be found into a single file: .markoutrc.json (you can specify another name in the terminal with the flag --config), if you don't load a configuration file the script will use its default values. There is an example of configuration in the repository root!

To specify a different configuration file use:

markout_html --config [filename]

The configuration file values

links - object of links to be extracted, each link has a destination value (output file). Example:

{
  "links": {
    "http://example.page.com/blog/some_post.html": "out/post.md",
    "http://example.page.com/blog/some_other_post.html": "out/other_post.md"
  }
}

The example above will get the HTML from http://example.page.com/blog/some_post.html and extract the results into out/post.md.

only_on - string that specify where (which HTML tag) to extract the contents from (e.g. : html, body, main). Example:

{
  "only_on": "article"
}

tokens - object in which each specified HTML tag will be extract into a formatted string and then placed on the output file. Example:

{
  "tokens": {
    "header": "# {}",
    "h1": "\n# {}",
    "h2": "\n# {}",
    "b": "\n## {}",
    "li": "+ {}",
    "i": "** {} **",
    "p": "\n{}",
    "span": "{}"
  }
}

On the example above, the contents of the HTML tag <header> will be extract into the # {} string, so for example, if we had <header>Some text here!</header> the result would've been # Some text here! (this formats the text into Markdown).

Contributions

Feel free to leave your contribution here, I would really appreciate it! Also, if you have any doubts or troubles using this package just contact me or leave an issue.