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.

Key features

Defuddle aims to be a replacement for Mozilla Readability, with a few differences:

• More forgiving, removes fewer uncertain elements
• Uses a page's mobile styles to guess at unnecessary elements
• Extracts more metadata from the page, including schema.org data

Installation

npm install defuddle

Usage

import { Defuddle } from 'defuddle';

const article = new Defuddle(document).parse();

// Use the extracted content and metadata
console.log(article.content);  // HTML string of the main content
console.log(article.title);    // Title of the article

Response

The parse() method returns an object with the following properties:

Property	Type	Description
content	string	HTML string of the extracted main content
title	string	Title of the article
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
published	string	Publication date of the article
author	string	Author of the article
site	string	Name of the website
schemaOrgData	object	Raw schema.org data extracted from the page

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

This will generate:

• dist/index.js - UMD build for both Node.js and browsers
• dist/index.d.ts - TypeScript declaration file