rdrview(1)

🌸 rdrview(1) — General Commands Manual 🌸

Okay bestie, so rdrview is a section 1 command and I'm literally obsessed with it, let me tell you everything 💖

✨ NAME ✨

rdrview — extract readable content from a webpage 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

rdrview [-v] [-u base-url] [-E encoding] [-A user-agent] [-T template]
[-P] [-c|-H|-M|-B browser] [path|url]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So here's the vibe: rdrview tries to pull out the meaningful content from a webpage — the exact same thing the "Reader View" feature in basically every modern browser does. No cap. It's made for terminal RSS readers, to clean up articles so they look cute on web browsers like lynx. 🦋

If you don't give it a url or a path, it'll read the HTML from standard input. And by default, rdrview checks mailcap for a way to display the content as text. But if you'd rather pick the browser yourself, you can — just say the word with the -B option, or set the RDRVIEW_BROWSER environment variable. Slay. 💅

✨ EXAMPLES ✨

Got a text mode browser? You can extract content with literally just:

rdrview 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_wide_web'

Wanna see that same article in a browser instead? Iconic, do this:

rdrview -B firefox 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_wide_web'

Cleaning up local HTML files? Say less:

rdrview -H -u 'http://fakehost.com' < source.html > result.html

And to mediate between the newsboat(1) feed reader and lynx(1) — yes, it's giving matchmaker energy:

BROWSER='rdrview -B lynx' newsboat

✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -c, --check — Doesn't extract anything, just does a quick little vibe check to see if the document appears to have any content at all. Exit status is 0 if it does, 1 otherwise. 🎀
• -u base-url, --base=base-url — Sets the base used for all relative URLs. Super useful for local files and standard input, where the document's URL might be a whole mystery. 🔍
• -v, --version — Prints the version number of rdrview and dips. ✌️
• -A user-agent, --agent=user-agent — Sets the user-agent string. Honestly the default should work fine in most situations, so don't stress.
• -B browser, --browser=browser — Tells rdrview which browser to display the result in. 🖥️
• -E encoding, --encoding=encoding — Sets the character encoding of the source. By default, the meta tags get checked. 👀
• -H, --html — Outputs the raw HTML for the extracted article. ⚠️ WARNING: the markup may still contain some scripts, so if you're planning to open it with a modern browser at some point, first check how it implements the same-origin policy for local files. Fr fr, don't skip that part. 😭
• -M, --meta — Outputs only the metadata for the article. Main character energy, minimal info. 👑
• -P, --preserve-classes — Don't remove html class attributes. Leave 'em be. 💜
• -T template, --template=template — Picks which metadata to include in the extracted article. The template is a comma-separated list of some of the following: title, body, byline, excerpt, sitename, url. The order matters, and metadata fields can be repeated. By default, only the body is included. 🍓
• --disable-sandbox — Disables the security sandbox. 💀 This one is potentially dangerous, so don't use it unless you actually know what you're doing.

✨ EXIT STATUS ✨

Exit status is 0 on success, 1 on failure. That's it, that's the whole rule. 🌈

✨ ENVIRONMENT ✨

Any environment understood by curl(1) can be used here. TMPDIR is respected as well. 🧚

• RDRVIEW_BROWSER — Default browser to display the extracted articles. The -B option overrides this.
• RDRVIEW_TEMPLATE — Default template for article content. The -T option overrides this; see that option for details.
• RDRVIEW_USER_AGENT — Default user-agent string, overridden by the -A option.

✨ BUGS ✨

Not gonna lie, the markup produced by the -H option is a huge mess. 😭 If you intend to work with it, you may want to pipe it to something like tidy(1) first.

Also — if you have a version of the libraries that hasn't been tested, the security sandbox might not allow the code to run. Please report this! But in the meantime, an option is provided to disable the sandbox: --disable-sandbox. Don't use it unless you have other security measures in place. 🙈

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Ernesto A. Fernández <ernesto.mnd.fernandez@gmail.com> 💌

Please report bugs via email or, if preferred, file a github issue at https://github.com/eafer/rdrview/issues. 🐛

Credits to Readability.js by Mozilla; this tool is mostly a transpilation of their code done by hand. Respect. 🔥

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

lynx(1), newsboat(1)

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Okay that's the whole page bestie, go forth and extract ✨🌸💖

rdrview 0.1.5 🌟 October 2025 🎀 — that's the version and date, mwah, bye! 💅🫶