Article Extractor

This skill extracts the main content from web articles and blog posts, removing navigation, ads, newsletter signups, and other clutter. Saves clean, readable text.

When to Use This Skill

Activate when the user:

Provides an article/blog URL and wants the text content Asks to "download this article" Wants to "extract the content from [URL]" Asks to "save this blog post as text" Needs clean article text without distractions How It Works Priority Order: Check if tools are installed (reader or trafilatura) Download and extract article using best available tool Clean up the content (remove extra whitespace, format properly) Save to file with article title as filename Confirm location and show preview Installation Check

Check for article extraction tools in this order:

Option 1: reader (Recommended - Mozilla's Readability) command -v reader

If not installed:

npm install -g @mozilla/readability-cli

or

npm install -g reader-cli

Option 2: trafilatura (Python-based, very good) command -v trafilatura

If not installed:

pip3 install trafilatura

Option 3: Fallback (curl + simple parsing)

If no tools available, use basic curl + text extraction (less reliable but works)

Extraction Methods Method 1: Using reader (Best for most articles)

Extract article

reader "URL" > article.txt

Pros:

Based on Mozilla's Readability algorithm Excellent at removing clutter Preserves article structure Method 2: Using trafilatura (Best for blogs/news)

Extract article

trafilatura --URL "URL" --output-format txt > article.txt

Or with more options

trafilatura --URL "URL" --output-format txt --no-comments --no-tables > article.txt

Pros:

Very accurate extraction Good with various site structures Handles multiple languages

Options:

--no-comments: Skip comment sections --no-tables: Skip data tables --precision: Favor precision over recall --recall: Extract more content (may include some noise) Method 3: Fallback (curl + basic parsing)

Download and extract basic content

curl -s "URL" | python3 -c " from html.parser import HTMLParser import sys

class ArticleExtractor(HTMLParser): def init(self): super().init() self.in_content = False self.content = [] self.skip_tags = {'script', 'style', 'nav', 'header', 'footer', 'aside'} self.current_tag = None

def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
    if tag not in self.skip_tags:
        if tag in {'p', 'article', 'main', 'h1', 'h2', 'h3', 'h4', 'h5', 'h6'}:
            self.in_content = True
    self.current_tag = tag

def handle_data(self, data):
    if self.in_content and data.strip():
        self.content.append(data.strip())

def get_content(self):
    return '\n\n'.join(self.content)

parser = ArticleExtractor() parser.feed(sys.stdin.read()) print(parser.get_content()) " > article.txt

Note: This is less reliable but works without dependencies.

Getting Article Title

Extract title for filename:

Using reader:

reader outputs markdown with title at top

TITLE=$(reader "URL" | head -n 1 | sed 's/^# //')

Using trafilatura:

Get metadata including title

TITLE=$(trafilatura --URL "URL" --json | python3 -c "import json, sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['title'])")

Using curl (fallback): TITLE=$(curl -s "URL" | grep -oP '