CurlyQ enhances the functionality of the curl command

CurlyQ is a utility tool developed by Brett Terpstra, designed to enhance the functionality of the curl command, which is commonly used for transferring data to or from a server. CurlyQ provides a more user-friendly interface and adds several features useful for tasks like web scraping and processing web data.

Some key features of CurlyQ include:

Enhanced Curl Functionality: It acts as a helper for the curl command, allowing users to easily grab web page contents and providing a breakdown of metadata, page images, links, and even handling dynamic pages loaded through JavaScript.

Scripting Pipeline Integration: CurlyQ is designed for use in scripting pipelines, simplifying tasks like extracting page titles, finding images, or validating links on a web page. It allows querying of results based on various attributes.

Element Retrieval: The tool incorporates Nokogiri, enabling element selection using CSS selectors or XPaths, and supports output in JSON or YAML formats.

Failure Handling: CurlyQ includes multiple User Agent strings and custom headers to handle request failures, retrying with different User Agent strings if necessary. It also has the capability to handle gzipped data.

Screenshot Capability: It can take screenshots of web pages in different modes like full page, visible page, or print output. This feature particularly works well with Firefox.

JSON Response Handling: CurlyQ has limited support for handling JSON responses, focusing on GET requests and providing response headers along with the parsed JSON results.

CurlyQ is still under development, with plans for future enhancements like adding POST capabilities and further developing its web scraping functionality. Terpstra encourages feedback from users to improve and expand the tool's capabilities.

For more detailed information and updates, you can visit the GitHub page of CurlyQ (https://github.com/ttscoff/curlyq) and Brett Terpstra's blog post (https://brettterpstra.com/2024/01/10/introducing-curlyq-a-pipeline-oriented-curl-helper/) introducing CurlyQ.