How do you view a webpage without a browser in a console?

[a6h]

How do you view a webpage without a browser in a console?

 

[eternal_noob]

How to you fly to the next continent without using a plane?

 

[hardworkingnewbie]

What's the purpose of that question? First of all there are enough browsers working in console, like Lynx, W3M and others. Lynx also has --dump.

Second you could just use your programming language of choice with an HTML parsing library of your choice, request the page, parse it and save its context as plain text.

Either way is no rocket science, and there are enough premade scripts around for that.

 

[Crivens]

How to you fly to the next continent without using a plane?

A really strong catapult may get you from europe to africa. Other than that, falling down the right mountain in the urals may land you in asia, or tripping on the right border crossing in central america may send you airborn to the next continent. See? Easy. And yes, that last clown I ate was over its best-before date.

 

[eternal_noob]

man telnet

falling down the right mountain in the urals may help you view a webpage without using the proper tool (browser).

 

[George]

True IT-masochists use elinks/lynx/w3m.

 

[eternal_noob]

Way better than telnet.

 

[Alain De Vos]

wget,lynx,elinks

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I don't. Unless you mean view the markup. And then I still don't.

 

[covacat]

$fetch -o - https://www.freebsd.org|xmllint --xpath '//*/text()' --html - 2>/dev/null| grep .|more

 

[Alain De Vos]

This trick does not work on random sites like,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news

I think many pages are "too complex"

 

[ralphbsz]

Used to use wget, changed to curl. But as Alain said, in practice modern web pages are no longer human-readable and don't consist of a single HTTP download.

 

[a6h]

Either way is no rocket science

As the title of the poll, i.e. "without a browser".

e.g. you need few hints from a handbook/faq/howto, enough to set some options right, in order to config a intro(4)/man(4) device correctly.

 

[richardtoohey2]

I'm with covacat - just use fetch - it's built-in, nothing to install. That's usually enough to see what's in the page.

 

[hardworkingnewbie]

As the title of the poll, i.e. "without a browser".

e.g. you need few hints from a handbook/faq/howto, enough to set some options right, in order to config a intro(4)/man(4) device correctly.

If you would have read my whole post - which you did not - you would have also known that you could just use your language of choice with pre-bundled HTML parser.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Used to use wget, changed to curl.

But how do you display the pages using those? I'm not talking "with additional tools" like the fetch example earlier.

 

[ralphbsz]

But how do you display the pages using those? I'm not talking "with additional tools" like the fetch example earlier.

Emacs, more, ... but for modern complex web pages, that's impractical. For simple stuff, it works great.
Often I actually use it to download pdf files or images.

 

[a6h]

But how do you display the pages using those?

For simple operations works. For example, I somtetimes use it to grep(1) out the ftp mirrors from the FreeBSD Handbook | A.2. FTP Sites

 

[zirias@]

fetch -o- <url> | less

 

[D-FENS]

True IT-masochists use elinks/lynx/w3m.

nc
lynx is a fine piece of software. The problem is that almost all websites today are infected with Javascript and they simply do not work.

 

[gpw928]

Currently, I don't (but have in the past):

[strand.312] $ grep "text/html;" ~/.mailcap
#text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html; copiousoutput;
#text/html;lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
#text/html;firefox %s; nametemplate=%s.html
#text/html;elinks -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
#@#Sun Jan 19 14:57:59 AEDT 2020#text/html;chrome %s; nametemplate=%s.html
#@#text/html;iridium %s; nametemplate=%s.html
#@#text/html;w3m -cols 72 -I %{charset} -T text/html -s | sed -e 's:^[[:blank:]]*$::' | cat -s | less; copiousoutput
#@@text/html; lynx -dump -force_html -stdin | sed -e 's:^[[:blank:]]*$::' | less -s
#@#text/html;luakit %s >/dev/null 2>&1; nametemplate=%s.html
#@#text/html;midori %s >/dev/null 2>&1; nametemplate=%s.html
text/html;firefox %s >/dev/null 2>&1; nametemplate=%s.html

 

[drhowarddrfine]

fetch -o- <url> | less

No, that only fetches the markup but doesn't display the page. That's also not on the list.

 

[Alain De Vos]

When i as a European look at U.S. pages i first need to agree on the applicable law, before i can even see the first page. This is interactive ...
Not all internet pages are as simple as freshports .

 

[zirias@]

No, that only fetches the markup but doesn't display the page. That's also not on the list.

The markup is just a representation of the document, so sure that's a display. As curl and telnet are on the list, I'm pretty sure that's fine.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

Zirias No. He asks "How do you view a webpage..." Looking at or downloading the markup using curl or telnet is not viewing a web page. I take that to mean NOT just wanting to look at the source markup.