harn read

harn read [options] [html-file]

Turns an HTML page into clean, readable markdown — Readability strips the chrome (nav, ads, boilerplate) and Turndown converts what’s left. Reads from a file argument or from stdin when the argument is -, which is what makes it the tail end of a scrape pipeline. Pair it with harn fetch or harn browse:

harn fetch https://example.com | harn read -

Options

Flag	Description
-o, --output <file>	Write markdown to a file instead of stdout.
--url <url>	Base URL, used to resolve relative links in the source HTML.
--selector <css>	Extract from this CSS selector instead of Readability. The fallback for when automatic extraction misses the main content.
--raw	Output cleaned HTML instead of markdown (for debugging extraction).
--max-chars <n>	Truncate output to N characters (0 disables). Default 100000.

Examples

# Convert a saved HTML file to markdown
harn read /path/to/page.html

# Canonical scrape-to-markdown pipeline (stdin via '-')
harn fetch https://example.com | harn read -

# Fetch raw HTML with a real browser, then extract
harn browse https://example.com --html | harn read -

# Supply a base URL so relative links resolve
harn fetch https://example.com/article | harn read - --url https://example.com

# Bypass Readability when it misses the main content
harn read /path/to/page.html --selector 'main.article'

# Inspect the cleaned HTML instead of markdown
harn read /path/to/page.html --raw

Notes

Readability works best on article-shaped pages. When a page’s real content lives outside what Readability picks (an app shell, a dashboard, a narrow content pane), pass --selector to target it directly, or use --raw to see what the cleaner kept before converting.