Quick start

Let’s say you want to grab all the links on http://example.com/foo/bar:

$ curl http://example.com/foo/bar | que "a->href"

Let’s say that gave you 3 lines that looked like this:

/some/url?val=1
/some/url2?val=2
/some/url3?val=3

Ugh, that’s not very helpful, so let’s modify our argument a bit:

$ curl http://example.com/foo/bar | que "a->http://example.com{href}"

Now, that will print:

http://example.com/some/url?val=1
http://example.com/some/url2?val=2
http://example.com/some/url3?val=3

Selecting

Not sure how to use CSS Selectors?

• Beautiful Soup CSS select docs

• JQuery’s CSS Selector docs

The selector is divided into two parts separated by ->, the first part is the traditional selector talked about in the above links and the second part is the attributes you want to print to the screen for each match:

$ css.selector->attribute,selector

The Selector part uses Python’s string formatting syntax so you can embed the attributes you want within a larger string.

Examples

Find all the “Download” links on a page:

que has support for the the non-standard :contains css selector

$ curl http://example.com | que "a:contains(Download)->href"

Select all the links with attribute data that starts with “foo”:

$ curl http://example.com | que "a[data|=foo]->href"

Installation

You can use pip to install stable:

$ pip install que

or the latest and greatest (which might be different than what’s on pypi:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/jaymon/que#egg=que

Notes

• If you need a way more fully featured html command line parser, try hq.