npm package: @philschmid/clipper
Description: A CLI to clip articles from the web and save them as markdown files.
Author: Philipp Schmid
Latest version: 0.2.0

# Clipper

Clipper is a Node.js command line tool that allows you to easily clip content from web pages and convert it to Markdown. It uses [Mozilla's Readability library](https://github.com/mozilla/readability) and [Turndown](https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown) under the hood to parse web page content and convert it to Markdown.

Clipper provides a quick and simple way to save bits of content from the web for personal archival or note taking purposes, similar to browser extensions like Evernote Web Clipper or Notion Web Clipper. However, Clipper runs entirely in the terminal so you don't need to install any extensions or sign up for accounts.


| HTML                                   | Markdown                                       |
| -------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------- |
| ![Screenshot of HTMl](assets/html.png) | ![Screenshot of Markdown](assets/markdown.png) |

## Installation

```
npm install -g @philschmid/clipper
```

_note: for crawling you need `playwright` and the browser dependencies._

## Usage

### Clip

**Options:**

- `-i, --input <file> | <directory>` - Input file (html) or directory to clip content from. If a directory is provided, all files in the directory will be clipped.
- `-u, --url <url>` - URL to clip content from
- `-f, --format <format>` - Output format (markdown, json) (default: markdown)
- `-o, --output <file>` - Output file for clipped content (default: output.md)


**Examples:**

1. Clip content from a URL:

```
clipper clip -u <url>
```

2. Clip content from a file:

```
clipper clip -i <file>
```

3. Clip content from a directory, convert a directory of HTML files to a jsonl file:

```
clipper clip -i <directory> -f json -o dataset.jsonl
```

### Crawl 

> [!WARNING]  
> Only use this command if you know what you're doing. Crawling websites can be resource intensive and may cause issues for the website owner. Use at your own risk.

**Options:**

- `-u, --url <url>` - URL to crawl
- `-g, --glob <glob>` - Glob pattern to match URLs against
- `-o, --output <file>` - Output file for crawled content (default: dataset.jsonl)

**Examples:**

Crawl a site and clip all pages:

```
clipper crawl -u <url>
```

Results will be saved in `dataset.jsonl` file in the current directory.

## Alternative use cases 

### Convert PDF to Markdown

If you want to convert a PDF to Markdown you can use [poppler](https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/poppler-utils/) to convert the PDF to HTML and then use Clipper to convert the HTML to Markdown.

```
pdftohtml -c -s -noframes test.pdf test.html
clipper clip -i test.html
```


## Local Development

- Clone the repo
- Run `npm install`
- Run `npm run test -- clip -u https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/index` to test the CLI
- Run `npm run test -- clip -i examples/` to test the CLI with directory input
- Run `npm run test -- crawl -u https://awsdocs-neuron.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/v2.14.1/index.html -g https://awsdocs-neuron.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/v2.14.1/\*\*/\*` to crawl the AWS Neuron docs
- Run `npm run build` to build for production
- Run `npm install -g .` to symlink the CLI for local testing
- Run `clipper clip -u https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/index` to build for development
- Remove the symlink with `npm r clipper -g`
## Credits

Clipper uses the following open source libraries:

- [Mozilla Readability](https://github.com/mozilla/readability) - For parsing article content
- [Turndown](https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown) - For converting HTML to Markdown  
- [Crawlee](https://crawlee.dev/) - For crawling websites

## License

* Apache 2.0


## Release to npm

1. Remove old build files with `rm -rf dist`
1. Update the version in `package.json` if minor or major version
2. Run `npm run build`
3. Run `npm publish --access public`
4. Create a new release on GitHub
5. Update the version in `package.json` to the next patch version