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diff --git a/system/xidel/README b/system/xidel/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..34602c26d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/system/xidel/README @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +xidel (tool to extract data from HTML/XML/JSON files or pages) + +Xidel is a command line tool to query data from HTML/XML web pages, +JSON-APIs and local files. It implements interpreters for XPath 2, +XPath 3, XQuery 1, XQuery 3, JSONiq, CSS selectors and custom pattern +matching. + +XPath and CSS selectors are the most efficient way to select certain +elements from XML/HTML documents. JSONiq (with custom extensions) +is an easy way to select data from JSON. XQuery is a Turing-complete +superset of XPath and allows arbitrary data transformations and the +creation of new documents. + +Pattern matching is for XML/HTML documents what regular expressions +are for plaintext, i.e. pattern matching behaves like a regular +expression over the space of tags, instead over the space of +characters. + +Xidel implements a kind of internal pipes to pipe HTTP requests from +one query to the next, so there is no need to distinguish selecting +links and downloading the data referenced by them. Therefore arbitrary +complex queries going over arbitrary many pages can be executed with a +single call of Xidel. + +Xidel is a powerful and complex tool, with a steep learning +curve. For examples, see the man page xidel(1), and also +/usr/doc/xidel-$VERSION/examples/. The full documentation is available +via "xidel --usage | less". |