Show HN: Defuddle, an HTML-to-Markdown alternative to Readability

2 days ago 3

de·fud·dle /diˈfʌdl/ transitive verb
to remove unnecessary elements from a web page, and make it easily readable.

Beware! Defuddle is very much a work in progress!

Defuddle extracts the main content from web pages. It cleans up web pages by removing clutter like comments, sidebars, headers, footers, and other non-essential elements, leaving only the primary content.

Try the Defuddle Playground →

Defuddle aims to output clean and consistent HTML documents. It was written for Obsidian Web Clipper with the goal of creating a more useful input for HTML-to-Markdown converters like Turndown.

Defuddle can be used as a replacement for Mozilla Readability with a few differences:

More forgiving, removes fewer uncertain elements.
Provides a consistent output for footnotes, math, code blocks, etc.
Uses a page's mobile styles to guess at unnecessary elements.
Extracts more metadata from the page, including schema.org data.

For Node.js usage, you'll also need to install JSDOM:

import { Defuddle } from 'defuddle'; // Parse the current document const defuddle = new Defuddle(document); const result = defuddle.parse(); // Access the content and metadata console.log(result.content); console.log(result.title); console.log(result.author);

import { JSDOM } from 'jsdom'; import { Defuddle } from 'defuddle/node'; // Parse HTML from a string const html = '<html><body><article>...</article></body></html>'; const result = await Defuddle(html); // Parse HTML from a URL const dom = await JSDOM.fromURL('https://example.com/article'); const result = await Defuddle(dom); // With options const result = await Defuddle(dom, { debug: true, // Enable debug mode for verbose logging markdown: true, // Convert content to markdown url: 'https://example.com/article' // Original URL of the page }); // Access the content and metadata console.log(result.content); console.log(result.title); console.log(result.author);

Note: for defuddle/node to import properly, the module format in your package.json has to be set to { "type": "module" }

Defuddle returns an object with the following properties:

Property Type Description

author	string	Author of the article
content	string	Cleaned up string of the extracted content
description	string	Description or summary of the article
domain	string	Domain name of the website
favicon	string	URL of the website's favicon
image	string	URL of the article's main image
metaTags	object	Meta tags
parseTime	number	Time taken to parse the page in milliseconds
published	string	Publication date of the article
site	string	Name of the website
schemaOrgData	object	Raw schema.org data extracted from the page
title	string	Title of the article
wordCount	number	Total number of words in the extracted content

Defuddle is available in three different bundles:

Core bundle (defuddle): The main bundle for browser usage. No dependencies.
Full bundle (defuddle/full): Includes additional features for math equation parsing.
Node.js bundle (defuddle/node): Optimized for Node.js environments using JSDOM. Includes full capabilities for math and Markdown conversion.

The core bundle is recommended for most use cases. It still handles math content, but doesn't include fallbacks for converting between MathML and LaTeX formats. The full bundle adds the ability to create reliable <math> elements using mathml-to-latex and temml libraries.

Option Type Description

debug	boolean	Enable debug logging
url	string	URL of the page being parsed
markdown	boolean	Convert content to Markdown
separateMarkdown	boolean	Keep content as HTML and return contentMarkdown as Markdown
removeExactSelectors	boolean	Whether to remove elements matching exact selectors like ads, social buttons, etc. Defaults to true.
removePartialSelectors	boolean	Whether to remove elements matching partial selectors like ads, social buttons, etc. Defaults to true.

You can enable debug mode by passing an options object when creating a new Defuddle instance:

const article = new Defuddle(document, { debug: true }).parse();

More verbose console logging about the parsing process
Preserves HTML class and id attributes that are normally stripped
Retains all data-* attributes
Skips div flattening to preserve document structure

Defuddle attempts to standardize HTML elements to provide a consistent input for subsequent manipulation such as conversion to Markdown.

The first H1 or H2 heading is removed if it matches the title.
H1s are converted to H2s.
Anchor links in H1 to H6 elements are removed and become plain headings.

Code block are standardized. If present, line numbers and syntax highlighting are removed, but the language is retained and added as a data attribute and class.

Inline references and footnotes are converted to a standard format:

Inline reference<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. <div id="footnotes"> <ol> <li class="footnote" id="fn:1"> <p> Footnote content. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref">↩</a> </p> </li> </ol> </div>

Math elements, including MathJax and KaTeX, are converted to standard MathML: