parselcli 0.33.1

CLI interpreter for xpath and css selectors

About parselcli

parselcli is a command line interface wrapper for parsel package for evaluating css and xpath selection real time against web urls or local html files.

Parsel is a library to extract data from HTML and XML using XPath and CSS selectors

Features:

• Supports css and xpath expression.
• Interactive shell with autocomplete.
• Css and xpath hints based on current webpage DOM.
• Full input history.
• Cache support for repeated usage.
• Extensive and instant text processing via text processor flags.

Usage

$ parsel --help                                                                                                      
Usage: parsel [OPTIONS] [URL]

  Interactive shell for css and xpath selectors

Options:
  -h TEXT                         request headers, e.g. -h "user-agent=cat
                                  bot"
  -xpath                          start in xpath mode instead of css
  -p, --processors TEXT           comma separated processors: {}
  -f, --file FILENAME             input from html file instead of url
  -c TEXT                         compile css and return it
  -x TEXT                         compile xpath and return it
  --cache                         cache requests
  --config TEXT                   config file  [default:
                                  /home/dex/.config/parsel.toml]
  --embed                         start in embedded python shell
  --shell [ptpython|ipython|bpython|python]
                                  preferred embedded shell; default auto
                                  resolve in order
  --help                          Show this message and exit.

parselcli reads XML or HTML file from url or disk and starts interpreter for xpath or css selectors. By default it starts in css interpreter mode but can be switched to xpath by -xpath command and switched back with -css. Interpreter also has auto complete and suggestions for selectors [in progress]

The interpreter also supports commands and embedding of python, ptpython, ipython and bpython shells. Command can be called with - prefix. List of available commands can be found by calling -help command (see Example section).

Processors and Commands

parsecli supports flags and commands in shell:

$ parsel "https://github.com/granitosaurus/parsel-cli"                                                               
> -help                                                                                                              
available commands (use -command):
  help: show help
  debug: show debug info
  embed: start interactive python shell
  open: open current url in browser tab
  view: open current html in browser tab
  fetch: download from new url
  css: switch to css selectors
  xpath: switch to xpath selectors
available flags (use +flag to enable and -flag to disable)
  strip: strip every element of trailing and leading spaces
  first: take first element when there's only one
  collapse: collapse lists when only 1 element
  absolute: convert relative urls to absolute
  join: join results into one
  len: return length of results

Processors can be activated with + prefix and deactivated with -. These processors can be supplied inline:

> h1::text +strip
['parsel-cli']

or activated for whole session

> +strip 
enabled flag: strip

Commands are just called as is with sometimes taking a positional argument:

> -fetch "http://some-other-url.com"
downloading "http://some-other-url.com"
> -view
opening document in browser

Example

$ parsel "https://github.com/granitosaurus/parsel-cli"                                                               
> h1::text                                                                                                           
['\n  ', '\n  ', '\n\n', 'parsel-cli']
> +join +strip                                                                                                       
enabled flag: join
enabled flag: strip
> h1::text                                                                                                           
parsel-cli
> h1::text +len                                                                                                      
4
> -xpath                                                                                                             
switched to xpath
> //h1/text()                                                                                                        
parsel-cli
> -css                                                                                                               
switched to css
> -embed                                                                                                             
>>> locals()                                                                                                         
{'sel': <Selector xpath=None data='<html lang="en">\n  <head>\n    <meta char'>, 'response': <Response [200]>, 'request': <PreparedRequest [GET]>, '_': {...}, '_1': {...}}


>>> response                                                                                                         
<Response [200]>


>>>                                                                                                                  
> -debug                                                                                                             
200-https://github.com/granitosaurus/parsel-cli
enabled processors:
  Join
  Strip
> -help                                                                                                              
available commands (use -command):
  help: show help
  debug: show debug info
  embed: start interactive python shell
  open: open current url in browser tab
  view: open current html in browser tab
  fetch: download from new url
  css: switch to css selectors
  xpath: switch to xpath selectors
available flags (use +flag to enable and -flag to disable)
  strip: strip every element of trailing and leading spaces
  first: take first element when there's only one
  collapse: collapse lists when only 1 element
  absolute: convert relative urls to absolute
  join: join results into one
  len: return length of results

Install

pip install parselcli

or install from github:

pip install --user git+https://github.com/Granitosaurus/parsel-cli@v0.33

Config

parselcli can be configured via toml configuration file found in $XDG_HOME/parsel.toml (usually ~/.config/parsel.toml):

# default processors (the +flags)
processors = [ "collapse", "strip",]
# where ptpython history is located
history_file_css = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_css"
history_file_xpath = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_xpath"
history_file_embed = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/history_embed"

[requests]
# when using --cache flag for using cached responses
cache_expire = 86400
# where sqlite cache file is stored for cache
cache_dir = "/home/user/.cache/parsel/requests.cache"

[requests.headers]
# here headers can be defined for requests to avoid bot detection etc.
User-Agent = "parselcli web inspector"
# e.g. chrome on windows use
# User-Agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/62.0.3202.94 Safari/537.36"