Install xidel with Homebrew, chocolatey, Nix, scoop

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• xidel

Project history

The official homepage dates the initial Xidel release to 2012-09-05 and describes it as the first stand-alone command-line release of the VideLibri backend. Author Benito van der Zander maintains the tool, and the homepage states that the source history lives in a SourceForge Mercurial repository with GitHub and GitLab mirrors.

Xidel's evolution is language-support driven. Version 0.6 added XQuery support in 2012, 0.7 added JSONiq in 2013, 0.8 improved JSONiq and added arbitrary precision arithmetic in 2014, 0.9 expanded XPath/XQuery 3 syntax in 2015, 0.9.4 completed much of XPath/XQuery 3.0 support in 2016, and the 0.9.9 development branch advertises broad XPath/XQuery 3.1 and partial XPath 4.0 syntax support.

Adoption history

Xidel is not a mass-market CLI like curl, but it has a loyal scraper/data-extraction niche because it can handle awkward mixed web data without gluing together several programs. The GitHub mirror metadata shows hundreds of stars, while the homepage documents prebuilt binaries for Windows, Linux, Android, and Mac preview builds, plus a single-binary usage model.

Its adoption path often overlaps with users of `curl`, `wget`, `xmlstarlet`, `jq`, XPath tools, and web scrapers. The difference is that Xidel can fetch, follow, query, pattern-match, transform, serialize, and export shell variables inside one XQuery-capable executable.

How it is used

Typical usage is `xidel URL --extract QUERY`, where the query may be CSS, XPath, XQuery, JSONiq, or an annotated pattern template. The homepage examples include extracting Google result URLs, following links and printing titles, querying JSON APIs, submitting forms, transforming HTML, serializing JSON/XML/HTML, and exporting extracted values as shell variables.

Package users reach for Xidel when a one-liner needs more structure than grep/sed but less ceremony than a custom scraper. It is especially useful for HTML pages with broken markup, API responses that need XPath-like traversal, and data extraction tasks that mix downloading, following links, and transforming output.

Why package nerds care

Xidel is package-nerd significant because it is an unusually dense single-purpose CLI: web fetcher, query language runtime, and data serializer in one package. That makes it a useful example of a tool whose value comes from bundling several web-data primitives behind one stable command.

It also has a distinctive maintenance profile: FreePascal source, Mercurial origin, Git mirrors, SourceForge downloads, and modern package-manager distribution. That mix makes it feel like old-school Unix web tooling that kept absorbing newer query-language standards.

Timeline

• 2012-09-05: initial Xidel release as a stand-alone command-line tool from the VideLibri backend.
• 2012-11-06: version 0.6 adds XQuery support.
• 2013-03-26: version 0.7 adds JSONiq support.
• 2015-06-28: version 0.9 adds more XPath/XQuery 3.0 syntax, higher-order functions, and multipart form support.
• 2016-06-08: version 0.9.4 completes much of XPath/XQuery 3.0 support and improves XQuery Test Suite conformance.
• 2018-04-02: version 0.9.8 improves cookies, module loading, pattern matching, and multipage-template functions.
• 0.9.9 development: the project advertises XPath/XQuery 3.1 progress and partial XPath 4.0 syntax support.

Related projects

• VideLibri is the parent application/backend lineage from which Xidel was split as a stand-alone command-line tool.
• XPath, XQuery, JSONiq, CSS selectors, and the W3C serialization/data-model standards are the query-language ecosystem Xidel packages for command-line use.
• curl, wget, jq, and xmlstarlet are adjacent command-line tools that overlap with Xidel's web fetching, JSON querying, and XML processing use cases.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/benibela/xidel
• https://github.com/benibela/xidel
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/benibela/xidel/master/changelog
• https://sourceforge.net/p/videlibri/news/
• https://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html