title: Article Management sidebar_label: Management description: Save URLs, inspect metadata, and read articles without leaving the CLI. sidebar_position: 2#

Article Management#

Save Articles from URLs#

noteleaf article add https://example.com/long-form-piece

What happens:

1. The CLI checks the database to ensure the URL was not imported already.
2. It fetches the page with a reader-friendly User-Agent (curl/8.4.0) and English Accept-Language headers to avoid blocked responses.
3. Parsed content is written to Markdown and HTML files under articles_dir.
4. A database record is inserted with all metadata and file paths.

If parsing fails (unsupported domain, network issue, etc.) nothing is written to disk, so partial entries never appear in your archive.

Parsing and Extraction#

The parser uses a two-layer strategy:

1. Domain-specific rules check the XPath selectors defined in internal/articles/rules. These rules strip unwanted elements (cookie banners, nav bars), capture the main body, and record author/date fields accurately.
2. Heuristic fallback scores every DOM node, penalizes high link-density sections, and picks the most “article-like” block. It also pulls metadata from JSON-LD Article objects when available.

During saving, the Markdown file gets a generated header:

# Article Title

**Author:** Jane Smith

**Date:** 2024-01-02

**Source:** https://example.com/long-form-piece

**Saved:** 2024-02-05 10:45:12

Everything after the --- separator is the cleaned article content.

Reading in the Terminal#

There are two ways to inspect what you saved:

• noteleaf article view <id> shows metadata, verifies whether the files still exist, and prints the first ~20 lines as a preview.
• noteleaf article read <id> renders the full Markdown using Charm’s Glamour, giving you syntax highlighting, proper headings, and wrapped paragraphs directly in the terminal.

If you prefer your editor, open the Markdown path printed by view. Both Markdown and HTML copies belong to you, so feel free to annotate or reformat them.

Article Metadata Reference#

Use noteleaf article list to see titles and authors:

noteleaf article list                 # newest first
noteleaf article list "sqlite"        # full-text filter on titles
noteleaf article list --author "Kim"  # author filter
noteleaf article list -l 5            # top 5 results

Each entry includes the created timestamp. The view command provides the raw paths so you can script around them, for example:

md=$(noteleaf article view 12 | rg 'Markdown:' | awk '{print $3}')
$EDITOR "$md"

All metadata lives in the SQLite articles table, making it easy to run your own reports with sqlite3 if needed.