defuddle

Defuddle

Extract the main content from web pages and convert to clean Markdown. Removes navigation, ads, sidebars, footers, and comments. Built by the Obsidian team.

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18+ installed
• npx available (comes with npm)
• Or install globally: npm install -g defuddle

Commands

Extract as Markdown (default choice)

npx defuddle parse <url> --md

Extract as JSON (includes metadata)

npx defuddle parse <url> --json

JSON output includes: content, title, author, description, domain, site, favicon, image, language, published, wordCount, parseTime.

Save to file

npx defuddle parse <url> --md -o output.md

Extract specific metadata property

npx defuddle parse <url> -p title
npx defuddle parse <url> -p author
npx defuddle parse <url> -p description
npx defuddle parse <url> -p domain
npx defuddle parse <url> -p published

Parse a local HTML file

npx defuddle parse page.html --md

When to Use

• Reading an article, blog post, or documentation page
• Clipping web content to save in the vault
• Extracting text from a URL the user provided
• Minimizing token usage when processing web pages (removes clutter)
• Converting web content to Obsidian-compatible Markdown

When NOT to Use

• Pages requiring authentication or login
• API endpoints returning JSON/XML (use curl or fetch directly)
• Pages that are already Markdown or plain text
• Dynamic single-page apps that require JavaScript interaction

Workflow: Clip to Vault

# 1. Extract the content
npx defuddle parse "https://example.com/article" --md -o /tmp/clip.md

# 2. Read the extracted content
cat /tmp/clip.md

# 3. Save to vault (via obsidian CLI or obsidian-connector MCP)
obsidian create path="Inbox/article-title.md" content="$(cat /tmp/clip.md)"

Troubleshooting

• "npx: command not found": Install Node.js from https://nodejs.org
• First run is slow: npx downloads the package on first use (~2-3 seconds)
• Empty output: The page may block automated access. Try a different URL.
• For faster repeated use: npm install -g defuddle then use defuddle parse (no npx)

Site-Specific Extractors

Defuddle includes optimized extractors for:

• Twitter/X (via FxTwitter API)
• Reddit
• Hacker News
• ChatGPT conversations
• Grok conversations

These return cleaner output than the generic extractor for those platforms.