Is there any way to script Newsboat?

[Philip Rhoades P]

People,

I have been using Newsboat for quite a while now and it has been exactly what I had been looking for all that time - thanks to the developers!

However, more recently I have been cutting and pasting header lines from some podcast post info to put massage into MarkDown format -> HTML and then into a little web site I use to track particular political issues.

This works fine for occasional posts from different podcasters but now I would like to automate the process from one or two podcasters in particular.  I can see that there is a "Save" option for when I am looking at the details of a podcast but is there anyway I can get this information from a Bash script?

Thanks for any help / suggestions!

Phil.

[Alexander Batischev]

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Hi, and apologies for such a delayed reply!

On Sun, Aug 17, 2025 at 04:39:07AM -0700, 'Philip Rhoades P' via newsboat wrote:
>is there anyway I can get this information from a Bash script?

Try `pipe-to`: https://newsboat.org/releases/2.42/docs/newsboat.html#pipe-to

Press | (pipe character), type the path to the Bash script, press Enter,
and the script will receive the current item at its stdin. The item is
formatted into plain text the same way as with "Save" command.

I realize this is suboptimal, because you have to parse the header and
the body yourself. To add insult to injury, we don't make any
compatibility guarantees about this format, although I think we only
ever added new fields to the header.

There are thoughts to provide a better facility for this, but nobody
picked that up yet: https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/1691

- --
Regards,
Alexander Batischev

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Fingerprint: CE6C 4307 9348 58E3 FD94 A00F 3569 61A2 0C8B FD03

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