dollar-sign

Installation

This is intended to be used as a command-line tool, so would usually be installed globally:

npm install -g @andrewtaylor/dollar-sign

Usage and aims

dollar-sign takes an input stream, parses it as HTML, then returns the inner text of any elements that match a supplied selector.

I built it because I was doing a crossword and the clue "Mark fighter for country (4)" came up. The answer presumably was something that means 'mark', followed by a fighter, which makes a four-letter country, and since I already had 12 across, I knew it ended in "I". I'd found a list of countries but it wasn't sortable by length or last letter so it didn't help much.

With this tool, I can do this:

curl -s https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-countries-1993160 \
	| dollar-sign ".topic-list li" \
	| egrep -i "^[a-z]{3}i$";

It reports the only four-letter countries ending in I are Fiji and Mali. "M" means "Mark" and "ALI" is a fighter, so that was the answer.

I expect this tool has other uses.

Options

If it isn't the inner text you want, you can pick out attributes:

curl -s http://example.com \
	| dollar-sign -a class "li > a"

Or you can pick out the tag name:

curl -s http://example.com \
	| dollar-sign -t ".some-class"