M: Let’s try a new project. I keep getting in situations where I’m using the book cataloging software calibre four purposes that it’s not directly intended for – such as cataloging my games – and constantly refer to two or three online databases, repeating the same actions to pull information and images off the sites. I’d like to automate this in a simple way, preferably using bash. First, is there a way for a bash script to read the text of an HTML file?

G: Yes, a Bash script can absolutely read the text of an HTML file. However, how you want to extract and process that text will determine what tools you use in combination with Bash.

🔹 Basic Reading: Just raw HTML

You can read an HTML file line by line like any text file:

while IFS= read -r line; do
  echo "$line"
done < "yourfile.html"

But this just gives you raw HTML, which isn't useful if you're trying to extract actual text or structured data.

🔹 Extracting Text from HTML

To extract visible text from HTML (ignoring tags), use:

lynx -dump -nolist yourfile.html

Or:

w3m -dump yourfile.html

These will give you a plain-text version of what you'd see in a terminal browser.

🔹 Parsing HTML (for scraping specific elements)

If you want to pull out <img> tags, <title>, or structured data, you'll need to combine Bash with tools like:

pup – like jq for HTML
```
pup 'img attr{src}' < yourfile.html
```

xmllint – good for well-formed HTML/XML

xmllint --html --xpath '//title/text()' yourfile.html 2>/dev/null

grep, sed, and awk – fine for dirty hacks, not robust for real parsing

🔹 Downloading HTML in Bash

To get a file from a URL:

curl -s "https://example.com/page.html" -o temp.html

Then run one of the extractors above on temp.html.

TL;DR

Yes, Bash can read HTML files. For meaningful use:

Use lynx -dump or w3m for raw text.
Use pup or xmllint to extract structured content.
Use curl or wget to download pages first.

Let me know the actual fields you’re trying to extract (e.g. cover image, title, developer), and from which sites, and I’ll tailor a full pipeline.