Text extraction from HTML page

Question

I am using xidel command to extract text from HTML page. Here is my code

  xidel  http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/8.8.8.8 --extract "<table>
  <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 <table>
 <tbody>
  <tr> </tr>
 <template:loop>
  <tr> <th> {$field1} </th> <td> ${field2} </td> </tr>
  </template:loop>
  </tbody>
   </table>
   </td>
   <td> </td>
    </tr>
    </tbody>
     </table>
       " 

I have used template method. When I run this code. I don't get error nor any output at the terminal. This is what I get after executing this code

    **** Retrieving (GET): http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/8.8.8.8 ****
    **** Processing: http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/8.8.8.8 ****
     ** Current variable state: **

and returns me the $ prompt. I want to know whether the output is stored in any variable?

Answer 1

The examples given for xidel make it apparent that it writes to the standard output. If you want to capture that information, you must redirect the standard output to a file, or to a shell variable yourself.

For instance, example 10 does this to set variables in bash:

eval "$(xidel http://site -e 'title:=//title' -e 'links:=//a/@href' --output-format bash)"

There is a note at the bottom of the examples pointing to a readme file for xidel (apparently the documentation as such).