de·fud·dle /diˈfʌdl/ transitive verb
to remove unnecessary elements from a web page, and make it easily readable.

Beware! Defuddle is very much a work in progress!

Defuddle extracts the main content from web pages. It cleans up web pages by removing clutter like comments, sidebars, headers, footers, and other non-essential elements, leaving only the primary content.

Try the Defuddle Playground →

Features

Defuddle aims to output clean and consistent HTML documents. It was written for Obsidian Web Clipper with the goal of creating a more useful input for HTML-to-Markdown converters like Turndown.

Defuddle can be used as a replacement for Mozilla Readability with a few differences:

More forgiving, removes fewer uncertain elements.
Provides a consistent output for footnotes, math, code blocks, etc.
Uses a page's mobile styles to guess at unnecessary elements.
Extracts more metadata from the page, including schema.org data.

Usage

Browser

import Defuddle from 'defuddle';
// Parse the current document
const defuddle = new Defuddle(document);
const result = defuddle.parse();
// Access the content and metadata
console.log(result.content);
console.log(result.title);
console.log(result.author);

Node.js

import { JSDOM } from 'jsdom';
import { Defuddle } from 'defuddle/node';
// Parse HTML from a string
const html = '<html><body><article>...</article></body></html>';
const result = await Defuddle(html);
// Parse HTML from a URL
const dom = await JSDOM.fromURL('https://example.com/article&#39;);
const result = await Defuddle(dom);
// With options
const url = 'https://example.com/article&#39;; // Original URL of the page
const result = await Defuddle(dom, url, {
debug: true, // Enable debug mode for verbose logging
markdown: true // Convert content to markdown
});
// Access the content and metadata
console.log(result.content);
console.log(result.title);
console.log(result.author);

Note: for defuddle/node to import properly, the module format in your package.json has to be set to { "type": "module" }

CLI

Defuddle includes a command-line interface for parsing web pages directly from the terminal.

# Parse a local HTML file defuddle parse page.html Parse a URL defuddle parse https://example.com/article Output as markdown defuddle parse page.html --markdown Output as JSON with metadata defuddle parse page.html --json Extract a specific property defuddle parse page.html --property title Save output to a file defuddle parse page.html --output result.html Enable debug mode

defuddle parse page.html --debug

CLI Options

Option	Alias	Description
`--output <file>`	`-o`	Write output to a file instead of stdout
`--markdown`	`-m`	Convert content to markdown format
`--md`		Alias for `--markdown`
`--json`	`-j`	Output as JSON with metadata and content
`--property <name>`	`-p`	Extract a specific property (e.g., title, description, domain)
`--debug`		Enable debug mode

Installation

npm install defuddle

For Node.js usage, you'll also need to install JSDOM:

npm install jsdom

Response

Defuddle returns an object with the following properties:

Property	Type	Description
`author`	string	Author of the article
`content`	string	Cleaned up string of the extracted content
`description`	string	Description or summary of the article
`domain`	string	Domain name of the website
`favicon`	string	URL of the website's favicon
`image`	string	URL of the article's main image
`metaTags`	object	Meta tags
`parseTime`	number	Time taken to parse the page in milliseconds
`published`	string	Publication date of the article
`site`	string	Name of the website
`schemaOrgData`	object	Raw schema.org data extracted from the page
`title`	string	Title of the article
`wordCount`	number	Total number of words in the extracted content

Bundles

Defuddle is available in three different bundles:

Core bundle (defuddle): The main bundle for browser usage. No dependencies.
Full bundle (defuddle/full): Includes additional features for math equation parsing and Markdown conversion.
Node.js bundle (defuddle/node): Optimized for Node.js environments using JSDOM. Includes full capabilities for math and Markdown conversion.

The core bundle is recommended for most use cases. It still handles math content, but doesn't include fallbacks for converting between MathML and LaTeX formats. The full bundle adds the ability to create reliable <math> elements using mathml-to-latex and temml libraries.

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
`debug`	boolean	false	Enable debug logging
`url`	string		URL of the page being parsed
`markdown`	boolean	false	Convert `content` to Markdown
`separateMarkdown`	boolean	false	Keep `content` as HTML and return `contentMarkdown` as Markdown
`removeExactSelectors`	boolean	true	Remove elements matching exact selectors like ads, social buttons, etc.
`removePartialSelectors`	boolean	true	Remove elements matching partial selectors like ads, social buttons, etc.
`removeImages`	boolean	false	Remove images.
`useAsync`	boolean	true	Allow async extractors to fetch from third-party APIs when no local content is available.

Debug mode

You can enable debug mode by passing an options object when creating a new Defuddle instance:

const article = new Defuddle(document, { debug: true }).parse();

More verbose console logging about the parsing process
Preserves HTML class and id attributes that are normally stripped
Retains all data-* attributes
Skips div flattening to preserve document structure

HTML standardization

Defuddle attempts to standardize HTML elements to provide a consistent input for subsequent manipulation such as conversion to Markdown.

Headings

The first H1 or H2 heading is removed if it matches the title.
H1s are converted to H2s.
Anchor links in H1 to H6 elements are removed and become plain headings.

Code blocks

Code block are standardized. If present, line numbers and syntax highlighting are removed, but the language is retained and added as a data attribute and class.

<pre>
  <code data-lang="js" class="language-js">
    // code
  </code>
</pre>

Footnotes

Inline references and footnotes are converted to a standard format:

Inline reference<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>.
<div id="footnotes">
<ol>
<li class="footnote" id="fn:1">
<p>
Footnote content.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref">↩</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>

Math

Math elements, including MathJax and KaTeX, are converted to standard MathML:

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" data-latex="a \neq 0">
  <mi>a</mi>
  <mo>≠</mo>
  <mn>0</mn>
</math>

Development

Build

To build the package, you'll need Node.js and npm installed. Then run:

# Install dependencies npm install Clean and build

npm run build

Third-party services

When using parseAsync(), if no content can be extracted from the local HTML, Defuddle may fetch content from third-party APIs as a fallback. This only happens when the page HTML contains no usable content (e.g. client-side rendered SPAs). You can disable this by setting useAsync: false in options.

FxTwitter API — Used to extract X (Twitter) article content, which is not available in server-rendered HTML.

NAME

SYNOPSIS

INFO

DESCRIPTION

README

Features

Usage

Browser

Node.js

CLI

Parse a URL

Output as markdown

Output as JSON with metadata

Extract a specific property

Save output to a file

Enable debug mode