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spr

Quick start

Fetch your first page and read what came back.

Once spr is on your PATH:

spr --help       # the command tree
spr version      # build info

Fetch one page

spr get is the client with nothing on top of it. It follows the redirect chain, counts the hops, classifies the response, and prints what it found without parsing a single field.

$ spr get /article/10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3
url          https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3
final        https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3?error=cookies_not_supported&code=fbffe6f2
code         200
status       ok
redirects    3
bytes        718872
content type text/html; charset=utf-8

The page came back whole.

Three redirects on a first request is normal, not a warning. Every first request runs a cookie dance and comes back with ?error=cookies_not_supported&code=<uuid> appended, and the uuid is different every time.

Watch it refuse to lie about a pdf

$ spr get --kind pdf /content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-28170-9_5.pdf
status       wrong_kind
redirects    7
bytes        282045
content type text/html; charset=utf-8

Seven hops, a 200, and no pdf. The url ran the cookie dance, got sent across to the chapter page, and ran it again. Telling you ok here would be the tool lying to you.

Read one work

spr work is the first command that parses anything. A DOI is enough, and the four work types share one record.

$ spr work 10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3
doi           10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3
type          article
title         Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in machine learning: an introduction to concepts and methods
published in  Machine Learning 110(3) pp 457-506
access        free to read, access=Yes, world readable declared and empty
...
envelope      html, ok, 718572 bytes, 3 redirects, fetched 2026-08-18 10:12:04 UTC
              40 fields answered, 0 missed, 50 regions unread

Add --envelope to see which rung answered each field, and run spr extraction for the table of which rung is expected to answer what, and why. There is a longer walkthrough in reading one work.

Read the thing it was published in

spr journal 10994                    # by Springer id, or by either issn
spr journal 10994 --volumes          # 114 volumes and 348 issues, one more request
spr book 978-3-031-28170-9           # by isbn, or by doi
spr book --chapters 10.1007/978-3-031-28170-9
spr series 558

Three pages, three records, because a journal has an impact factor and no price and a book has four ISBNs and no volumes. Reading a container covers what each one carries and where it comes from.

Take the raw page, or json

spr get --body /journal/10994 > journal.html
spr get -o json /article/10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3 | jq .status

See what is cached

spr cache
spr cache --clear

The cache is keyed on the url you asked for, never the one the redirect chain landed on, because that one carries a per request uuid and no key would ever be seen twice.

3 min read