WeChat-article-reader

What This Skill Does

The WeChat-article-reader skill is a specialized automation tool designed for OpenClaw agents to capture and archive content from the WeChat public platform (mp.weixin.qq.com). Instead of manually copying and pasting content, users can provide a link to the agent, which then fetches the HTML structure, parses metadata such as the author, publish time, and title using Open Graph protocols, and converts the rich text body into a clean, structured Markdown file. This skill is particularly useful for researchers, journalists, or content creators who need to maintain a local knowledge base of articles in a portable, version-controlled format like Markdown, complete with YAML Front Matter for better organization.

Installation

To install this skill, use the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/8421bit/wechat-article-reader. Before running, ensure that your Python environment has the necessary dependencies installed. You can check your status by running the verification command: python3 -c "import requests, bs4, markdownify". If the command fails, install the required packages using pip3 install requests beautifulsoup4 lxml markdownify. No API keys are required as the tool uses direct HTTP requests to retrieve content.

Use Cases

• Personal Knowledge Management: Automatically building a local Markdown repository of industry insights, tutorials, or news from various WeChat official accounts.
• Content Curation: Extracting key information from long-form articles to consolidate into reports or newsletters without losing metadata.
• Archival: Saving articles to ensure they remain accessible offline even if the original content is deleted or modified by the author.

Example Prompts

1. "Download this WeChat article to my workspace: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/example123"
2. "Can you export this公众号 article for me and save it as a markdown file?"
3. "Please save the article from this link https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/abc to my documents folder."

Tips & Limitations

• Storage: By default, files are saved to ~/.openclaw/workspace-qiming/source with a timestamped filename, but you can specify a custom path.
• Formatting: The tool converts HTML to Markdown but does not download embedded images; it focuses on the text-based content to keep files lightweight.
• Access Control: Note that articles requiring a manual WeChat login to view cannot be accessed by this script.
• Rate Limiting: WeChat maintains strong anti-bot protections; avoid rapid-fire requests to prevent your IP from being temporarily blocked.