Get text from webpage

Scriptable
1

If there a way to just get the text from a web page? I can get the html from a web page but need just the text.

2

Some possible solutions I can think of:

  • Load jQuery into the website (preferably with a data URL, so it isn’t dependend on your internet speed), and when loaded, run $("body").text(); in the website. This returns the whole text.
    1. Download node.js on your computer
    2. install browserify and cheerio via npm
    3. run browserify -r cheerio
    4. copy the output file to your iCloud Drive into the Scriptable folder (or any subfolder)
    5. in your Scriptable script import the file from above like const cheerio = importModule("lib/cheerio")("cheerio"); (assumed, you’ve placed the file at lib/cheerio.js). Why the second call? Because the file from browserify returns a function to load different modules and we want to load cheerio
    6. Load the HTML from your page in question
    7. Load the HTML into cheerio with let $ = cheerio.load(html);, where html contains the HTML
    8. Get the text with $("body").text()

There might be some errors, I haven’t tested any of this

1 Like
3

This could be improved, but If you want to use shortcuts, this might get you started.

From safari, share webpage to shortcut.

Preview Text of Webpage

4

Yes that works…sometimes. It’s a website that has frames. So sometimes I get the body and sometimes I don’t. But then I just put in an if statement that says if body has no value run the shortcut again. Not pretty but hey it works. Thanks!