Web Scraping & Parsing
HTML to Markdown
Convert any webpage HTML into clean Markdown from the edge
Fetch a webpage and convert its HTML into clean Markdown for notes, LLM prompts, and content pipelines - all from Cloudflare's edge.
Features
- Converts headings, paragraphs, emphasis, links, images, lists, code, and blockquotes
- Prefers
<article>/<main>content when present (falls back to<body>) - Resolves relative link and image URLs against the page URL
- Strips
script,style,svg, and similar non-content tags - Caps HTML input at 1MB and Markdown output at 200k characters
- Stateless; no bindings required
API Reference
GET /markdown
Fetches HTML and returns title plus Markdown.
Prop
Type
Example Request
curl "https://your-worker.workers.dev/markdown?url=https://example.com"Success Response
url string
Final page URL after redirects
title string | null
Document <title> when present
markdown string
Converted Markdown body
{
"url": "https://example.com/",
"title": "Example Domain",
"markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in illustrative examples…"
}Error Response
{
"error": "Expected HTML, got content-type: application/json",
"code": "NOT_HTML"
}Error Codes
400- Missing or invalidurl(INVALID_URL)400- Response was not HTML (NOT_HTML)502- Fetch failed (FETCH_ERROR)
Use Cases
- Turn blog posts into Markdown for note-taking apps
- Prepare page content for LLM prompts without raw HTML noise
- Build content migration / archival pipelines on Workers
- Complement readability extraction with a portable text format
Limitations
- Does not execute JavaScript; client-rendered content is not included
- Table conversion is not fully structured (tables flatten as block text)
- Complex nested layouts may produce extra blank lines
- Conversion is heuristic, not a full HTML5 / CommonMark guarantee
Use in your project
Copy these files into an existing Worker. Prefer Deployment to try the full experiment first. Source: apps/experiments/html-to-markdown.
DependenciesNoneBindingsNonePlatformFetch API
import { FETCH_TIMEOUT_MS, MAX_HTML_BYTES, USER_AGENT } from "../constants/defaults";export type PageFetchResult = | { ok: true; url: string; html: string } | { ok: false; code: "FETCH_ERROR" | "NOT_HTML"; error: string };export async function fetchHtml(url: string): Promise<PageFetchResult> { const controller = new AbortController(); const timeoutId = setTimeout(() => controller.abort(), FETCH_TIMEOUT_MS); try { const res = await fetch(url, { method: "GET", redirect: "follow", signal: controller.signal, headers: { "User-Agent": USER_AGENT, Accept: "text/html,*/*" }, }); clearTimeout(timeoutId); if (!res.ok) { return { ok: false, code: "FETCH_ERROR", error: `HTTP ${res.status}` }; } const contentType = res.headers.get("content-type") ?? ""; if (!contentType.includes("text/html") && !contentType.includes("application/xhtml")) { return { ok: false, code: "NOT_HTML", error: `Expected HTML, got content-type: ${contentType || "unknown"}`, }; } const text = await res.text(); return { ok: true, url: res.url || url, html: text.length > MAX_HTML_BYTES ? text.slice(0, MAX_HTML_BYTES) : text, }; } catch (e) { clearTimeout(timeoutId); return { ok: false, code: "FETCH_ERROR", error: e instanceof Error ? e.message : "Unknown error", }; }}Deployment
Deploy
Follow the deployment wizard. No bindings or secrets required.
Test your deployment
curl "https://your-worker.workers.dev/markdown?url=https://example.com"Local Development
cd apps/experiments/html-to-markdown
npm install
npm run devTest locally:
curl "http://localhost:8787/markdown?url=https://www.cloudflare.com"