extract_href

extract_href is a command line tool for extracting urls from a HTML web page, writing each url on a new line. Each matched url is:

• absolute (referenced by source url)
• unique - (no duplicates are added to the list)
• refers to a separate resource - (no url fragments)

It uses a jquery-style selector to search the HTML document for elements that have an href attribute to construct a de-duplicated list of href attributes It has three major command line options:

• u - (required) url of html document
• o - path to output file
• s - (required, default: "a") - jquery-style selector to match html elements

License & Copyright

Copyright (C) 2017 Data Together
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3.0.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See the LICENSE file for details.

Getting Involved

We would love involvement from more people! If you notice any errors or would like to submit changes, please see our Contributing Guidelines.

We use GitHub issues for tracking bugs and feature requests and Pull Requests (PRs) for submitting changes

Installation

You will need go installed to build extract_href from source, then run:

go get -u github.com/datatogether/extract_href

test that it's working by running a raw extract_href, which should output help text.

Usage

extract_href -u https://www.epa.gov/endangered-species/biological-evaluation-chapters-chlorpyrifos-esa-assessment -s '.main-column.clearfix a'

This will fetch the epa.gov url, select all "a" tags in the document that are a decendant of any element with the classes "main-column" and "clearfix" and build a deduplicated list of absolute urls using the href attribute of all found anchor tags. Run that same command adding -o urls.txt to save the results to a file and see output stats instead. Picking the right jQuery selector is a bit of an art. The goal is to isolate the most general part of the page that contains all of the links that you're after. For more information on jquery selectors and how they work, have a look at the jQuery selection docs. When in doubt, it's often fine to leave the default "a" selector, which will generate lots of links you may not want, and manually remove those from the output file.

Development

Coming soon!