xidel Command Examples

Download and extract data from HTML/XML pages as well as JSON APIs. More information: https://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html.

• Print all URLs found by a Google search:

xidel {{https://www.google.com/search?q=test}} {{[-e|--extract]}} "//a/extract(@href, 'url[?]q=([^&]+)&', 1)[. != '']"

• Print the title of all pages found by a Google search and download them:

xidel {{https://www.google.com/search?q=test}} {{[-f|--follow]}} "{{//a/extract(@href, 'url[?]q=([^&]+)&', 1)[. != '']}}" {{[-e|--extract]}} {{//title}} --download {{'{$host}/'}}

• Follow all links on a page and print the titles, with XPath:

xidel {{https://example.org}} {{[-f|--follow]}} {{//a}} {{[-e|--extract]}} {{//title}}

• Follow all links on a page and print the titles, with CSS selectors:

xidel {{https://example.org}} {{[-f|--follow]}} "{{css('a')}}" --css {{title}}

• Follow all links on a page and print the titles, with pattern matching:

xidel {{https://example.org}} {{[-f|--follow]}} "{{<a>{.}</a>*}}" {{[-e|--extract]}} "{{<title>{.}</title>}}"

• Read the pattern from example.xml (which will also check if the element containing "ood" is there, and fail otherwise):

xidel {{path/to/example.xml}} {{[-e|--extract]}} "{{<x><foo>ood</foo><bar>{.}</bar></x>}}"

• Print all newest Stack Overflow questions with title and URL using pattern matching on their RSS feed:

xidel {{http://stackoverflow.com/feeds}} {{[-e|--extract]}} "{{<entry><title>{title:=.}</title><link>{uri:=@href}</link></entry>+}}"

• Check for unread Reddit mail, Webscraping, combining CSS, XPath, JSONiq, and automatically form evaluation:

xidel {{https://reddit.com}} {{[-f|--follow]}} "{{form(css('form.login-form')[1], {'user': '$your_username', 'passwd': '$your_password'})}}" {{[-e|--extract]}} "{{css('#mail')/@title}}"