internettools

I completely agree. It is amazing how powerful Xidel is, and also easy to use with command line oneliners - for most of my task there is no need to start writing a script or programming anything. But it would be possible with the underlying library of Xidel, internettools [1]. Fun fact: it is implemented in Free Pascal, a language for which I have great respect and which is unfortunately underrated in 2024 compared to the newer kids on the block (Rust, Go, Zig, ...). [1] https://github.com/benibela/internettools

I wrote my own library for that: https://github.com/benibela/internettools On Windows it is a wrapper around wininet and on Linux around another library Synapse. The HTTP client is in the directory internet, the HTML/XPath parser in the directory data.

With a non-mainstream language, it is pretty much always a compiler bug I use Pascal, because it is very fast and has automated reference counting (ARC) for most types, so it is almost memory safe. It was the only way to get C-like speed, fast compilation and no memory issues. With ARC you never get uninitialized values, you never get a use-after-free, and you never get a double-free. A few days ago, I ran my program in valgrind's memcheck: double-free detected That was hard to debug. Valgrind told me where the value was created, but not where it was freed the first time. Turns out, FreePascal just put an unmatch refcount decrement after a string comparison: https://github.com/benibela/internettools/commit/4c510e8c977... Time to update FreePascal. I use "nightly" builds of FreePascal because the stable version did not have Android aarch64