Pluck — Zig CLI to extract readable content from the web

pluck is a fast Zig CLI that extracts the main readable text from a URL, local HTML file, or stdin. It uses libxml2 for broken-HTML recovery and a Readability-inspired scoring pipeline implemented in Zig.

Requirements

• Zig 0.15.2
• curl for URL fetching
• libxml2 headers and runtime
• Optional for --render: Node.js plus playwright

On macOS, run:

./scripts/bootstrap-macos.sh

Build

zig build
zig build test

For an optimized binary:

zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe
./zig-out/bin/pluck --help

Usage

pluck https://example.com/post
pluck --file testdata/sample_article.html
cat page.html | pluck --stdin
pluck --json https://example.com/post
pluck --render https://example.com/post

Flags:

• --json: emit structured JSON
• --render: enable the optional Playwright sidecar if raw extraction looks poor
• --timeout <ms>: network and renderer timeout budget
• --max-bytes <n>: cap fetched/read HTML size
• --user-agent <value>: override the default user agent

Output

Default output is markdown-ish readable text. --json emits:

• title
• byline
• site_name
• url
• excerpt
• text_markdown
• text_plain
• length
• rendered

Render Sidecar

--render does not launch a browser unless the first raw extraction pass looks weak. If you want that path available:

npm install playwright

The sidecar script lives at scripts/render_page.mjs.

Benchmarks

There is a small benchmark helper at scripts/benchmark.sh that compares pluck against an optional Node baseline using Mozilla Readability.

Current Limits

• JS-heavy pages need --render
• The extractor aims for behaviorally similar output, not Firefox parity
• Very short pages and app-like layouts can still fail the article heuristic

Releases

The public repository is intentionally a release-only history: one snapshot commit and one annotated vX.Y.Z tag per version. Commit messages describe user-visible features and fixes rather than the private development process. The public tree is complete source code and can be built normally.

Release mechanics and the private/public history boundary are documented in RELEASING.md.

License

Pluck is available under the MIT License.