Pipet: The Swiss Army Knife for Web Data Extraction

As developers, we've all been there: you need to extract some data from a website, API, or document, but the process involves jumping between different tools, writing custom parsers, or dealing with messy data formats. It's the kind of task that starts simple but quickly becomes a time sink.

Enter Pipet – a versatile command-line tool that aims to be your go-to solution for extracting data from pretty much anywhere. Think of it as the Swiss Army knife for web scraping and data extraction, designed specifically for developers who need to get stuff done without the overhead.

What It Does

Pipet is a command-line tool that extracts data from various sources – websites, APIs, local files – and outputs clean, structured data in formats like JSON, CSV, or XML. It handles the messy parts of web scraping: dealing with different content types, handling authentication, parsing HTML, and transforming raw data into usable formats.

The tool operates on a simple philosophy: point it at a resource, tell it what data you want, and get structured results back. No need to write complex scraping scripts or manually parse HTML unless you want to.

Why It's Cool

What makes Pipet stand out is its flexibility and hacker-friendly approach. Instead of being locked into one specific scraping method, it gives you multiple ways to extract data:

• CSS selectors for quick and familiar web scraping
• jq-style filters for JSON data manipulation
• XPath for complex XML/HTML queries
• Custom extractors for when you need something specific

The real power comes from how these can be chained together. Want to scrape a webpage, extract specific elements with CSS, then filter and transform that data? Pipet makes it a one-liner.

It also handles the practical concerns developers face – following redirects, dealing with cookies, handling different encodings, and working with APIs that require authentication. The tool feels like it was built by someone who's actually done this work before, not just theorized about it.

How to Try It

Getting started with Pipet is straightforward. You'll need Rust installed, then it's just:

cargo install pipet

Once installed, you can start extracting data immediately. Here's a simple example to get weather information:

pipet -s "span.temp" https://weather.com

Or chain multiple operations together:

pipet -s "div.product" https://example-store.com | pipet -s "h2.name" -s "span.price"

The GitHub repository has comprehensive examples showing everything from basic scraping to more advanced workflows with authentication and data transformation.

Final Thoughts

Pipet feels like one of those tools that should have existed years ago. It's not trying to be the most powerful scraping framework or the simplest beginner tool – it strikes a nice balance where it's accessible for quick tasks but capable enough for serious data extraction work.

For developers who frequently need to pull data from various sources for prototyping, testing, or building data pipelines, Pipet could easily become a staple in your toolkit. It's the kind of utility that saves you from writing the same boilerplate code over and over, letting you focus on what actually matters – the data itself.

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