scraping-html-to-markdown

Scraping HTML to Markdown

crawlberg scrape <url> is the right tool when the user has a single page in mind. It returns Markdown plus a full structured payload (metadata, links, images, JSON-LD, HTTP response info).

Quick recipe

crawlberg scrape https://example.com/article --format markdown

JSON form (default) when downstream needs metadata:

crawlberg scrape https://example.com/article --format json

Flag surface

Flag	Default	Purpose
--format	json	json or markdown.
--timeout	30000	Per-request timeout in ms.
--proxy	—	HTTP, HTTPS, or SOCKS5 proxy URL.
--user-agent	—	Override request UA.
--respect-robots-txt	off	Honour robots.txt.
--browser-mode	auto	auto, always, never — see headless-fallback skill.
--browser-endpoint	—	External CDP ws:// URL.
--config	—	Inline JSON or @file.json for full CrawlConfig.

Output shape

Markdown mode

Prints the rendered Markdown only. Use when piping to a file the user will read, or when the result becomes LLM context downstream.

JSON mode

Top-level ScrapeResult with:

• final_url (after redirects), status_code, content_type, body_size, detected_charset — all top-level fields.
• markdown: { content, fit_content, tables, warnings } — fit_content is a pruned LLM-optimised variant; tables holds structured table data preserved separately from the Markdown text.
• metadata: Open Graph (flat og_title/og_description/og_image), Twitter Card, Dublin Core, article tags, headings (H1–H6), favicons, hreflang.
• links: a flat array of link objects, each with a link_type discriminator (internal, external, anchor, document) — filter with .links[] | select(.link_type=="external").
• images: <img>, <picture>, srcset, og:image.
• feeds, json_ld: top-level arrays of discovered feeds and JSON-LD entries.
• response_meta: HTTP header metadata (server, etag, cache-control, etc.).

Read result.markdown.content for the Markdown string when scripting.

Common pitfalls

Empty or stub content

Static fetch returned a JS shell. Symptoms in JSON output:

• markdown.content is short or only contains nav/footer chrome.
• markdown.warnings mentions JS-render-required.
• metadata.headings is empty when the page clearly has headings.

Re-run with --browser-mode always and see the headless-fallback skill.

WAF block

Auto mode detects 8 WAF vendors and retries through headless Chrome automatically. If you forced --browser-mode never, the WAF response will fall through. Check .status_code — 403/406/503 with WAF headers (server: cloudflare, x-amz-cf-id, etc.) is the giveaway.

Robots.txt blocking the fetch

If --respect-robots-txt is set and the path is disallowed, the scrape returns an error rather than partial content. Drop the flag only on hosts you own or have authorisation for.

Wrong charset

Most pages declare UTF-8. Pages that lie about their charset can surface as mojibake in markdown.content. crawlberg exposes no encoding-override option (there is no force_encoding/charset field in CrawlConfig, and --config rejects unknown keys), so an incorrectly declared charset is a server-side defect — re-fetch the raw bytes and transcode them downstream if you hit it.

Examples

Scrape an article for downstream LLM context

crawlberg scrape https://blog.example.com/post-123 --format markdown \
  > /tmp/article.md

Scrape with proxy and custom UA

crawlberg scrape https://example.com \
  --proxy http://proxy.internal:3128 \
  --user-agent "crawlberg (research@example.com)" \
  --format json

Extract just the OG metadata

crawlberg scrape https://example.com --format json \
  | jq '.metadata | {title: .og_title, description: .og_description, image: .og_image}'

When to reach for crawl or interact instead

• The user wants the whole site, not one page → crawling-a-site skill.
• The user needs to click, type, or scroll before extracting → use crawlberg interact with the action list.
• The user only wants the list of URLs → crawlberg map.