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Command-line tool for querying, slicing & dicing HTML using the XPath/XQuery derivative HQuery.

Project description

# hq Powerful HTML slicing and dicing at the command line.


hq is a Python-based command-line tool for querying HTML, manipulating data and producing results as HTML, JSON or any other format. It’s based on a compact, flexible expression language that started out as an XPath implementation but ended up going a few different places, so I’m going ahead and calling it HQuery.

HQuery is 99% compliant with the [XPath 1.0]( standard, minus some features not applicable to HTML. That’s nice for querying, but you need more power to take control of the shape and format of the data you produce. To that end, HQuery also includes…

  • Nuggets of XQuery &mdash; only a few of the good parts! Just enough for iteration, branching and the like.
  • XPath expansions for HTML &mdash; including a class:: axis and class() function, plus abbreviated axes to keep things terse.
  • Super-charged string interpolation &mdash; with powerful filters that you can chain together to transform data as you produce it.
  • Computed constructors for HTML and JSON &mdash; so you can programmatically assemble and output new HTML or JSON objects and arrays.
  • Out-of-left-field union decomposition &mdash; enabling amazingly terse and powerful mappings from clauses in a union to different expressions.

## Installing hq

pip install hq

## Running hq

cat /path/to/file.html | hq ‘Hello, ${/html/head/title}!


hq -f /path/to/file.html ‘Hello, ${/html/head/title}!

To print usage information:

hq –help

## Learning hq

The [wiki]( discusses the [motivations]( guiding the HQuery language’s design and provides a [language reference](

## Contributing to hq

hq is tested against Python 2.7 and recent generations of Python 3 (3.4 and 3.5, as of this writing). The file structure and script for the project are based on [this blog post](

hq’s dependencies are split into a “base” file, the subset needed to run the application, and a “dev” file providing the tools necessary to run tests and the like. To do development:

pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

The parsing logic in is based on the [top-down operator precendence]( approach.

### Running Tests


The “dev.txt” dependencies also include [pytest-cov](, so you can generate a nice coverage report (which you’ll find in the htmlcov directory):

py.test –cov=hq –cov-report html

If you want to turn verbosity on to figure out what’s going on in a test, you need the –gabby flag (since py.test owns its own -v flag). You’ll probably also want to run just one test at a time, because –gabby is way gabby:

py.test –gabby -vv -k some_particular_test_function

### Uploading to PyPI

This and other aspects of project setup, including running the CLI locally and using, are covered in the blog post linked above. For the sake of convenience, here’s the part about uploading to PyPI:

$ python sdist $ /bin/ls dist cmdline-bootstrap-0.2.0.tar.gz

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