Save HTML from clipboard as markdown text

Question

I want to be able to highlight a section of a web page and copy it to the clipboard then save it to my local disk as markdown. I need an efficient way to do that.

My current cumbersome method is:

1. highlight section and copy to clipboard
2. open Libre Office Writer
3. paste into Writer
4. save Writer doc as HTML
5. open terminal
6. cd to the directory where I saved the HTML
7. pandoc -s -r html /home/me/a/b/mydoc.html -o /home/me/a/b/mydoc.md

Obviously, I need a better method! Any suggestions?

Answer 1

With a recent version of xclip (the -t option was added in 2010 but not released until version 0.13 in 2016, so in 2013 you'd have had to get it from subversion, or use the one packaged in Debian).

xclip -o -selection clipboard -t text/html | pandoc -r html -w markdown

And if you want to make that back into the clipboard:

xclip -o -selection clipboard -t text/html |
  pandoc -r html -w markdown |
  xclip -i -selection clipboard

Which you can do in a loop with:

while :; do
  xclip -o -selection clipboard -t text/html |
    pandoc -r html -w markdown |
    xclip -i -selection clipboard -quiet
done

The second xclip, with -quiet will block until something else claims the CLIPBOARD selection, that is until you select something else somewhere.

That way, you can copy back and forth between your browser and whatever you're pasting the markdown in.

@tink also has a useful link to a similar question on StackOverflow where you can find how to implement it in python.