URLWATCH-FILTERS(5) urlwatch Documentation URLWATCH-FILTERS(5)

urlwatch-filters - Filtering output and diff data of urlwatch jobs

urlwatch --edit

Each job can have two filter stages configured, with one or more filters processed after each other:

  • Applied to the downloaded page before diffing the changes (filter)
  • Applied to the diff result before reporting the changes (diff_filter)

While creating your filter pipeline, you might want to preview what the filtered output looks like. You can do so by first configuring your job and then running urlwatch with the --test-filter command, passing in the index (from --list) or the URL/location of the job to be tested:

urlwatch --test-filter 1   # Test the first job in the list
urlwatch --test-filter https://example.net/  # Test the job with the given URL

The output of this command will be the filtered plaintext of the job, this is the output that will (in a real urlwatch run) be the input to the diff algorithm.

The filter is only applied to new content, the old content was already filtered when it was retrieved. This means that changes to filter are not visible when reporting unchanged contents (see Display for details), and the diff output will be between (old content with filter at the time old content was retrieved) and (new content with current filter).

Once urlwatch has collected at least 2 historic snapshots of a job (two different states of a webpage) you can use the command-line option --test-diff-filter to test your diff_filter settings; this will use historic data cached locally.

The list of built-in filters can be retrieved using:

urlwatch --features

At the moment, the following filters are built-in:

  • beautify: Beautify HTML
  • css: Filter XML/HTML using CSS selectors
  • csv2text: Convert CSV to plaintext
  • element-by-class: Get all HTML elements by class
  • element-by-id: Get an HTML element by its ID
  • element-by-style: Get all HTML elements by style
  • element-by-tag: Get an HTML element by its tag
  • format-json: Convert to formatted json
  • grep: Filter only lines matching a regular expression
  • grepi: Remove lines matching a regular expression
  • hexdump: Convert binary data to hex dump format
  • html2text: Convert HTML to plaintext
  • pdf2text: Convert PDF to plaintext
  • pretty-xml: Pretty-print XML
  • ical2text: Convert iCalendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar to plaintext
  • ocr: Convert text in images to plaintext using Tesseract OCR
  • re.sub: Replace text with regular expressions using Python's re.sub
  • re.findall: Find all non-overlapping matches using Python's re.findall
  • reverse: Reverse input items
  • sha1sum: Calculate the SHA-1 checksum of the content
  • shellpipe: Filter using a shell command
  • sort: Sort input items
  • remove-duplicate-lines: Remove duplicate lines (case sensitive)
  • strip: Strip leading and trailing whitespace
  • striplines: Strip leading and trailing whitespace in each line
  • xpath: Filter XML/HTML using XPath expressions
  • jq: Filter, transform and extract values from JSON

You can pick only a given HTML element with the built-in filter, for example to extract <div id="something">.../<div> from a page, you can use the following in your urls.yaml:

url: http://example.org/idtest.html
filter:
  - element-by-id: something

Also, you can chain filters, so you can run html2text on the result:

url: http://example.net/id2text.html
filter:
  - element-by-id: something
  - html2text

The example urls.yaml file also demonstrates the use of built-in filters, here 3 filters are used: html2text, line-grep and whitespace removal to get just a certain info field from a webpage:

url: https://example.net/version.html
filter:
  - html2text
  - grep: "Current.*version"
  - strip

If you want to extract only the body tag you can use this filter:

url: https://example.org/bodytag.html
filter:
  - element-by-tag: body

To filter based on an XPath https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xpath-19991116/ expression, you can use the xpath filter like so:

url: https://example.net/xpath.html
filter:
  - xpath: /html/body/marquee

This filters only the <marquee> elements directly below the <body> element, which in turn must be below the <html> element of the document, stripping out everything else.

See Microsoft’s XPath Examples https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256086(v=vs.110).aspx page for some other examples. You can also find an XPath of an <html> node in the Chromium/Google Chrome developer tools by right clicking on the node and selecting copy XPath.

To filter based on a CSS selector https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-css3-selectors-20110929/, you can use the css filter like so:

url: https://example.net/css.html
filter:
  - css: ul#groceries > li.unchecked

This would filter only <li class="unchecked"> tags directly below <ul id="groceries"> elements.

Some limitations and extensions exist as explained in cssselect’s documentation https://cssselect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#supported-selectors.

By default, XPath and CSS filters are set up for HTML documents. However, it is possible to use them for XML documents as well (these examples parse an RSS feed and filter only the titles and publication dates):

url: https://example.com/blog/xpath-index.rss
filter:
  - xpath:
      path: '//item/title/text()|//item/pubDate/text()'
      method: xml
url: http://example.com/blog/css-index.rss
filter:
  - css:
      selector: 'item > title, item > pubDate'
      method: xml
  - html2text: re

To match an element in an XML namespace https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names/, use a namespace prefix before the tag name. Use a : to separate the namespace prefix and the tag name in an XPath expression, and use a | in a CSS selector.

url: https://example.net/feed/xpath-namespace.xml
filter:
  - xpath:
      path: '//item/media:keywords/text()'
      method: xml
      namespaces:
        media: http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/
url: http://example.org/feed/css-namespace.xml
filter:
  - css:
      selector: 'item > media|keywords'
      method: xml
      namespaces:
        media: http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/
  - html2text

Alternatively, use the XPath expression //*[name()='<tag_name>'] to bypass the namespace entirely.

Another useful option with XPath and CSS filters is exclude. Elements selected by this exclude expression are removed from the final result. For example, the following job will not have any <a> tag in its results:

url: https://example.org/css-exclude.html
filter:
  - css:
      selector: body
      exclude: a

If you only want to return a subset of the items returned by a CSS selector or XPath filter, you can use two additional subfilters:

  • skip: How many elements to skip from the beginning (default: 0)
  • maxitems: How many elements to return at most (default: no limit)

For example, if the page has multiple elements, but you only want to select the second and third matching element (skip the first, and return at most two elements), you can use this filter:

url: https://example.net/css-skip-maxitems.html
filter:
  - css:
      selector: div.cpu
      skip: 1
      maxitems: 2

If you get multiple results on one page, but you only expected one (e.g. because the page contains both a mobile and desktop version in the same HTML document, and shows/hides one via CSS depending on the viewport size), you can use maxitems: 1 to only return the first item.

In some cases, the ordering of items on a webpage might change regularly without the actual content changing. By default, this would show up in the diff output as an element being removed from one part of the page and inserted in another part of the page.

In cases where the order of items doesn't matter, it's possible to sort matched items lexicographically to avoid spurious reports when only the ordering of items changes on the page.

The subfilter for css and xpath filters is sort, and can be true or false (the default):

url: https://example.org/items-random-order.html
filter:
  - css:
      selector: span.item
      sort: true

To monitor the text of a PDF file, you use the pdf2text filter. It requires the installation of the pdftotext https://github.com/jalan/pdftotext/blob/master/README.md#pdftotext library and any of its OS-specific dependencies https://github.com/jalan/pdftotext/blob/master/README.md#os-dependencies.

This filter must be the first filter in a chain of filters, since it consumes binary data and outputs text data.

url: https://example.net/pdf-test.pdf
filter:
  - pdf2text
  - strip

If the PDF file is password protected, you can specify its password:

url: https://example.net/pdf-test-password.pdf
filter:
  - pdf2text:
      password: urlwatchsecret
  - strip

The csv2text filter can be used to turn CSV data to a prettier textual representation This is done by supplying a format_string which is a python format string https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#format-string-syntax.

If the CSV has a header, the format string should use the header names lowercased. For example, let's say we have a CSV file containing data like this:

Name;Company
Smith;Initech
Doe;Initech

A possible format string for the above CSV (note the lowercase keys):

Mr {name} works at {company}

If there is no header row, you will need to use the numeric array notation:

Mr {0} works at {1}

You can force the use of numeric indices with the flag ignore_header.

The key has_header can be used to force use the first line or first ignore the first line as header, otherwise csv.Sniffer https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.Sniffer will be used.

Sometimes a web page can have the same data between comparisons but it appears in random order. If that happens, you can choose to sort before the comparison.

url: https://example.net/sorting.txt
filter:
  - sort

The sort filter takes an optional separator parameter that defines the item separator (by default sorting is line-based), for example to sort text paragraphs (text separated by an empty line):

url: http://example.org/paragraphs.txt
filter:
  - sort:
      separator: "\n\n"

This can be combined with a boolean reverse option, which is useful for sorting and reversing with the same separator (using % as separator, this would turn 3%2%4%1 into 4%3%2%1):

url: http://example.org/sort-reverse-percent.txt
filter:
  - sort:
      separator: '%'
      reverse: true

To reverse the order of items without sorting, the reverse filter can be used. By default it reverses lines:

url: http://example.com/reverse-lines.txt
filter:
  - reverse

This behavior can be changed by using an optional separator string argument (e.g. items separated by a pipe (|) symbol, as in 1|4|2|3, which would be reversed to 3|2|4|1):

url: http://example.net/reverse-separator.txt
filter:
  - reverse: '|'

Alternatively, the filter can be specified more verbose with a dict. In this example "\n\n" is used to separate paragraphs (items that are separated by an empty line):

url: http://example.org/reverse-paragraphs.txt
filter:
  - reverse:
      separator: "\n\n"

This is an example how to watch the GitHub “releases” page for a given project for the latest release version, to be notified of new releases:

url: https://github.com/tulir/gomuks/releases
filter:
  - xpath:
      path: //*[@class="Link--primary Link"]
      maxitems: 1
  - html2text:

This is the corresponding version for Github tags:

url: https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/tags
filter:
  - xpath:
      path: //*[@class="Link--primary Link"]
      maxitems: 1
  - html2text:

and for Gitlab tags:

url: https://gitlab.com/chinstrap/gammastep/-/tags
filter:
  - xpath: (//a[contains(@class,"item-title ref-name")])[1]
  - html2text

Alternatively, jq can be used for filtering:

url: https://api.github.com/repos/voxpupuli/puppet-rundeck/tags
filter:
  - jq: '.[0].name'

You can use re.sub and re.findall to apply regular expressions.

re.sub can be used to remove or replace all non-overlapping instances of matched text. The following example applies the filter 3 times:

1.
Just specifying a string as the value will replace the matches with the empty string.
2.
Simple patterns can be replaced with another string using “pattern” as the expression and “repl” as the replacement.
3.
You can use groups (()) and back-reference them with \1 (etc..) to put groups into the replacement string.

repl defaults to the empty string, which will remove matched strings.

url: https://example.com/regex-substitute.html
filter:
    - re.sub: '\s*href="[^"]*"'
    - re.sub:
        pattern: '<h1>'
        repl: 'HEADING 1: '
    - re.sub:
        pattern: '</([^>]*)>'
        repl: '<END OF TAG \1>'

re.findall can be used to find all non-overlapping matches of a regular expression. Each match is output on its own line. The following example applies the filter twice:

1.
It uses a group (()) and back-reference (\1) to extract a date from the input string.
2.
It breaks the numbers in the date out into separate lines.

If repl is not specified, the full match will be included in the output.

url: https://example.com/regex-findall.html
filter:
    - re.findall:
        pattern: 'The next draw is on (\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}).'
        repl: '\1'
    - re.findall: '\d+'

Note: When using HTML or XML, it is usually better to use CSS selectors or XPATH expressions. HTML and XML cannot be parsed https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/1047040 properly using regular expressions. If the CSS selector or XPATH cannot provide the targeted selection required, using an html2text filter first then using re.findall can be a good pattern.

If you want to enable flags (e.g. re.MULTILINE) in re.sub or re.findall filters, use an "inline flag", here are some examples:

  • re.MULTILINE: (?m) (Makes ^ match start-of-line and $ match end-of-line)
  • re.DOTALL: (?s) (Makes . also match a newline)
  • re.IGNORECASE: (?i) (Perform case-insensitive matching)

This allows you, for example, to remove all leading spaces (only space character and tab):

url: http://example.com/leading-spaces.txt
filter:
  - re.sub: '(?m)^[ \t]*'

While the built-in filters are powerful for processing markup such as HTML and XML, in some cases you might already know how you would filter your content using a shell command or shell script. The shellpipe filter allows you to start a shell and run custom commands to filter the content.

The text data to be filtered will be written to the standard input (stdin) of the shell process and the filter output will be taken from the shell's standard output (stdout).

For example, if you want to use grep tool with the case insensitive matching option (-i) and printing only the matching part of the line (-o), you can specify this as shellpipe filter:

url: https://example.net/shellpipe-grep.txt
filter:
  - shellpipe: "grep -i -o 'price: <span>.*</span>'"

This feature also allows you to use sed(1), awk(1) and perl(1) one-liners for text processing (of course, any text tool that works in a shell can be used). For example, this awk(1) one-liner prepends the line number to each line:

url: https://example.net/shellpipe-awk-oneliner.txt
filter:
  - shellpipe: awk '{ print FNR " " $0 }'

You can also use a multi-line command for a more sophisticated shell script (| in YAML denotes the start of a text block):

url: https://example.org/shellpipe-multiline.txt
filter:
  - shellpipe: |
      FILENAME=`mktemp`
      # Copy the input to a temporary file, then pipe through awk
      tee $FILENAME | awk '/The numbers for (.*) are:/,/The next draw is on (.*)./'
      # Analyze the input file in some other way
      echo "Input lines: $(wc -l $FILENAME | awk '{ print $1 }')"
      rm -f $FILENAME

Within the shellpipe script, two environment variables will be set for further customization (this can be useful if you have an external shell script file that is used as filter for multiple jobs, but needs to treat each job in a slightly different way):

Environment variable Contents
$URLWATCH_JOB_NAME The name of the job (name key in jobs YAML)
$URLWATCH_JOB_LOCATION The URL of the job, or command line (for shell jobs)

The ocr filter uses the Tesseract OCR engine https://github.com/tesseract-ocr to convert text in images to plain text. It requires two Python modules to be installed: pytesseract https://github.com/madmaze/pytesseract and Pillow https://python-pillow.org. Any file formats supported by Pillow (PIL) are supported.

This filter must be the first filter in a chain of filters, since it consumes binary data and outputs text data.

url: https://example.net/ocr-test.png
filter:
  - ocr:
      timeout: 5
      language: eng
  - strip

The subfilters timeout and language are optional:

  • timeout: Timeout for the recognition, in seconds (default: 10 seconds)
  • language: Text language (e.g. fra or eng+fra, default: eng)

The jq filter uses the Python bindings for jq https://stedolan.github.io/jq/, a lightweight JSON processor. Use of this filter requires the optional jq Python module https://github.com/mwilliamson/jq.py to be installed.

url: https://example.net/jobs.json
filter:
   - jq:
      query: '.[].title'

The subfilter query is optional:

•
query: A valid jq filter string.

Supports aggregations, selections, and the built-in operators like length. For more information on the operations permitted, see the jq Manual https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/urlwatch/urls.yaml

urlwatch(1), urlwatch-intro(5), urlwatch-jobs(5)

2024 Thomas Perl

October 28, 2024 urlwatch