---

name: defuddle description: Plan and, with explicit network consent, use an optional external Defuddle cleaner to extract article-like HTTPS pages as Markdown. Use for defuddle, clean this URL, strip page clutter, readable Markdown from a web page, or preparing a web source for later wiki ingestion.

Defuddle

Treat Defuddle as an optional external extractor, not an internal capability. Cleaning, raw capture, and wiki ingestion are separate operations.

Resolve the installed product root from this skill's own location, never from the selected vault or process working directory:

PRODUCT_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/installed/claude-obsidian
CORE="$PRODUCT_ROOT/scripts/claude-obsidian.py"
test -f "$CORE"

Every ../wiki/references/ link in this file resolves the same way, relative to this skill's own directory under $PRODUCT_ROOT, never relative to the selected vault's wiki/ directory.

If a separately installed kepano/obsidian-skills defuddle skill is available, prefer it for current CLI flags. Retain the privacy, consent, and transaction rules in this skill.

Safety contract

• Accept remote inputs only as HTTPS URLs.
• Reject credentials in URLs, fragments, private or local hosts, non-public IP addresses, control characters, and sensitive query parameters.
• Never interpolate a URL into a shell string. Pass it as one argv element.
• Treat redirects to a different host as denied until that host is explicitly approved.
• State that the URL and request metadata will leave the machine. Network access requires explicit consent in the current request or a separate confirmation.
• Do not install a cleaner, execute a placeholder runner, or silently switch to another network fetcher.
• Do not claim a fixed token reduction or extraction quality. Inspect the actual output.

Plan first

Create an inert URL plan. This validates the URL and executes no network call:

python3 "$CORE" capture external-plan url "HTTPS_URL"

Report the normalized host, network egress, redirect policy, optional external dependency, and execute: false. Then inspect whether this package can find a configured Defuddle executable:

python3 "$CORE" contracts --verify --capability defuddle --vault VAULT

An available state means no executable was found; stop with the inert plan. A configured state means the executable was discovered, but this package has no bundled behavioral verifier for it. Show that state and reason, identify the resolved executable path, and require manual review of its provenance, version, and exact argv before execution. Never relabel configured as verified.

When unavailable or when manual review is declined, offer these honest fallbacks: let the user install/configure an external runner, accept a local HTML or Markdown file in inbox/, or leave the URL queued for later. Do not claim that content was cleaned, captured, or ingested.

Execute after consent

After network consent, configured-state detection, and manual executable review, invoke the approved executable with an argv equivalent to:

defuddle parse HTTPS_URL --md

Capture bounded stdout in a temporary draft outside shared vault state. Fail closed on a non-zero exit, empty output, unexpected binary output, an unapproved redirect, or a response that is clearly an authentication/error page. Preserve headings, links, code fences, tables, quotations, and source wording; do not invent missing content.

Preview the cleaned Markdown and report extraction limitations. If the user asked only to read or analyze it, keep the result transient.

Optional raw capture

When the user asks to retain the cleaned source:

1. Resolve the user vault.
2. Hash the exact cleaned bytes with SHA-256.
3. Draft a new immutable payload such as .raw/captured/<sha256>.md and, when provenance metadata is needed, a new create-only sidecar with the normalized URL, retrieval date, extractor name and version, and content hash.
4. Use expected_hashes: null and mode: create. If that content-addressed payload already exists with the same bytes, report a no-op; never overwrite it.
5. Build, inspect, and apply one claude-obsidian.transaction.v1 capture bundle as described in operation-transactions.md.

Do not create wiki pages, update indexes, assess claims, or mark the source as ingested. Invoke wiki-ingest as a distinct requested operation if the user wants the captured payload incorporated into the knowledge base.