fetching-and-converting-urls

<!-- AI-RULEZ :: GENERATED FILE — DO NOT EDIT Content-Hash: blake3:0ec0d1cfab92165c75146dc9c2cd55f3885f8b8e94c2ef4adf24d251263e8697 Source-Hash: blake3:ee7b42dfe0189be4c8fc402a02da63aad9356731f32835e48c1312669d63bf3b Schema-Version: v1 --> # Fetching and converting URLs Use this when the user gives a URL instead of HTML and wants the page as Markdown (or its metadata/tables). The CLI fetches the page over HTTP and converts it in one step via `--url`. `--url` conflicts with a positional `FILE`. For crawling *many* pages or following links, use `crawlberg` instead — this skill is for a single URL. ## Fetch and convert ```bash # Fetch a URL, print Markdown to stdout html-to-markdown --url https://example.com # Save to a file html-to-markdown --url https://example.com -o page.md # Custom User-Agent (default mimics a real browser) html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --user-agent "MyBot/1.0" ``` `--user-agent` requires `--url`. ## Clean noisy pages Real web pages carry navigation, ads, cookie banners, and forms. Preprocess before converting: ```bash html-to-markdown --url https://example.com/article --preprocess --preset aggressive # Keep the nav or forms if the page content lives there html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --preprocess --keep-navigation ``` Presets: `minimal`, `standard` (default), `aggressive`. `--preset` and the `--keep-*` flags require `--preprocess`. ## JSON output (ConversionResult) Add `--json` to get the full structured result instead of plain Markdown: ```bash html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --json ``` ```json { "content": "# Title\n\nContent\n", "metadata": { "document": { "title": "...", "language": "en" }, "headers": [], "links": [], "images": [], "structured_data": [] }, "tables": [], "images": [], "warnings": [] } ``` Useful combinations (all require `--json`): ```bash # Page title + outline, no Markdown body html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --json --no-content \ | jq '{title: .metadata.document.title, headings: [.metadata.headers[].text]}' # Include the document-structure tree html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --json --include-structure | jq '.document' # Extract inline image data html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --json --extract-inline-images | jq '.images | length' ``` ## Surface warnings ```bash html-to-markdown --url https://example.com --show-warnings > page.md # non-fatal warnings (truncation, malformed markup) go to stderr ``` ## Exit codes | Code | Meaning | | ---- | ------- | | 0 | Success | | 1 | Conversion or I/O error (including a failed fetch) | | 2 | Invalid arguments | See `../html-to-markdown/references/cli-reference.md` for the full flag set and JSON shape.