# postlight/parser

📜 Extract meaningful content from the chaos of a web page

Repository: https://github.com/postlight/parser
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/parser
Homepage: https://reader.postlight.com
Language: JavaScript
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: rollup, jest, node, parser, parser-library, mercury-parser, mercury, labs
Last push: 2024-07-10T11:24:30+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3662, "days_push": 784, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 5786, forks 529 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:29.591345+00:00)

## What it is
Postlight Parser is a JavaScript library that extracts meaningful content—article text, titles, authors, dates, lead images, and excerpts—from any web page URL. It supports custom per-site parsers built with JavaScript and CSS selectors and also runs in the browser to parse the current page.

## Use cases
- extract article content from a url
- get title author and publish date from web pages
- build a reader mode like browser extension
- clean html from ads and clutter for readability
- scrape article metadata for a news aggregator
- create custom site-specific content extractors

## When to choose
- you need readable article content extracted from arbitrary web pages
- you want metadata like authors, dates, and lead images from articles
- you need a node or browser library for readability-style extraction
- you want to add custom per-domain extraction rules with css selectors

## When to avoid
- you need a general-purpose web crawler or full-site scraper
- you need to extract structured data from non-article pages like tables or product listings
- you need a headless browser for javascript-rendered or interactive pages
- you need a maintained actively developed solution for new edge cases

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: parser, web-scraping, nlp
- domain: web-development, developer-tools
- platform: browser
- tags: readability, content-extraction, article-parsing, mercury-parser, custom-extractors, natural-language-processing, nodejs, javascript

## Member repositories
- postlight/parser (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:29.591345+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:52:49.554094+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/postlight/parser (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:29.591345+00:00, sha 85c3e9f889f3)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.