Pretty please

I’ve been making a thing to solve some problems I always face while building web APIs. Curl is lovely but it’s a bit too flexible.

Also, web services generally spit out one of a fairly common set of formats: (json, xml, html) and I often just want to grab a value from the response and use it in a script - maybe to make the next call in a workflow.

So I made please which makes it super simple to do things like making a web request and grabbing a particular value from the response.

For example, here’s how you’d get the page title from this site:

please get https://engledow.me/ | please parse html.head.title.#text

Or getting a value out of the json returned by jsontest.com’s IP address API:

please get http://ip.jsontest.com/ | please parse ip

The parse part of please is the most fun; it can convert between a few different formats. Something I do quite often is grabbing a json response from an API and spitting it out as yaml so I can read it easily. For example:

please get http://date.jsontest.com/ | please parse -o yaml

(alright so that’s a poor example but the difference is huge when it’s a complicated bit of json)

Also handy for turning an unreadable mess of xml into yaml (I love yaml for its readability):

echo '<docroot type="messydoc"><a><b dir="up">A tree</b><b dir="down">The ground</b></a></docroot>' | please parse -o yaml

As an example, of the kinds of things you can play with, I made a tool for generating graphs from json.

I’m still working on please; there will be bugs; let me know about them.