decant-core

A shared extraction layer for the modern web — including AI conversations.

Every AI chat exporter ends up solving the same problem: extracting conversations from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek and other constantly changing AI interfaces.

And every time one of those platforms changes its UI, seriously re-renders a message, or ships a new feature, somebody's parser breaks.

decant-core provides reusable parsers, platform detection, and web article extraction so developers don't have to build and maintain the same fragile parsing layer over and over again.

Origin & Purpose

Existing chat exporters often suffer from two major flaws: they break whenever platform DOMs update, and many route user conversations through third-party servers.

decant-core was created to solve both at the foundation. Originally built to power local-first extensions like AI Chat Exporter and Decant, it decouples fragile platform parsing from presentation. By sharing this engine under AGPL-3.0, any browser extension, web clipper, archiver, or research tool can rely on a maintained, local-first extraction layer instead of reverse-engineering AI platforms in isolation.

npm install decant-core

Use it as the parsing layer underneath your own:

• chat exporters
• browser extensions
• web clippers
• research & data-extraction tools
• content archivers
• knowledge-management and PKM applications

Fix platform parsing once, and let the ecosystem benefit from the fix.

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Why decant-core?

AI platforms don't expose stable public APIs for reading conversation history. No matter what you build, to extract a ChatGPT thread you need to walk the DOM, read internal RPC payloads, or traverse React component trees — and redo it when the frontend changes.

Maintaining that per-platform logic in every exporter is wasteful and fragile. decant-core centralizes it:

• ✅ 19 AI chat platform parsers with normalized output — you get structured messages, models, metadata and Markdown, not DOM soup.
• ✅ Web article extraction — Mozilla Readability, Defuddle, and Article-Extractor run in parallel and arbitrate by content-quality scoring.
• ✅ Detection utilities — tell an "AI chat page" apart from a "regular web page" before you decide which parser to run.
• ✅ Math & Markdown handling — LaTeX normalization plus GFM tables/code fencing that survive round-trips into Obsidian, Logseq and Notion.

The payoff is maintenance: when a platform changes, the fix happens once, in one place, instead of being independently reimplemented across dozens of projects.

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Quickstart

1. Extract an AI conversation

import { detectPlatform, isAiChatUrl } from "decant-core";

if (isAiChatUrl(window.location.href)) {
  const match = detectPlatform(window.location.href);

  if (match?.parser && match.parser.isAvailable(window.location.href)) {
    const result = await match.parser.parse();
    // result.title
    // result.messages  -> [{ role: 'User' | 'Assistant', content, ... }]
    // result.model
    // result.metadata  -> platform-specific extras
  }
}

2. Extract a regular web article

import { extractArticle } from "decant-core";

const article = await extractArticle(document /* or an HTML string */, {
  url: window.location.href,
});

// article.title, article.author, article.published
// article.markdown       -> clean, ready-to-use Markdown
// article.content        -> the body without the title prefix
// article.engine         -> 'readability' | 'defuddle' | 'raw'

3. Detection

import { detectPlatform, isAiChatUrl, AI_CHAT_DOMAINS } from "decant-core";

isAiChatUrl("https://chatgpt.com/c/abc-123"); // -> true
const detected = detectPlatform(url); // -> { type: 'ai-chat', platform: 'ChatGPT', parser }

Subpath imports

// Individual parsers (tree-shake the rest)
import { ChatGPTParser } from "decant-core/ai/chatgpt";
import { ClaudeParser } from "decant-core/ai/claude";
import { GeminiParser } from "decant-core/ai/gemini";

// Web & article extraction
import { extractArticle, ArticleParser, scoreContent } from "decant-core";

// Detection
import { detectPlatform, isAiChatUrl, parsers } from "decant-core";

// Utilities
import { convertToMarkdown, cleanMarkdown } from "decant-core";
import { normalizeLatexMath } from "decant-core";

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Supported Platforms

19 AI chat platform parsers plus generic web article extraction:

Platform	Parser	Extraction strategy
ChatGPT	ChatGPTParser	DOM + internal API
Claude	ClaudeParser	DOM + internal API + React fiber
Google Gemini	GeminiParser	DOM + batchexecute RPC
Microsoft Copilot	CopilotParser	DOM
Perplexity	PerplexityParser	Internal API + DOM
DeepSeek	DeepSeekParser	DOM + internal API
Qwen	QwenParser	DOM
Meta AI	MetaParser	Internal API + DOM
Mistral / Le Chat	MistralParser	DOM
Proton Lumo	LumoParser	DOM
Z.ai	ZAiParser	Internal API + DOM
Grok	GrokParser	Internal API + DOM
Google AI Studio	GoogleAIStudioParser	DOM
NotebookLM	NotebookLMParser	DOM
Google Search AI (AI Overviews)	GoogleSearchAIParser	DOM
Gemini Cloud Assist	GeminiCloudAssistParser	DOM
Joyland	JoylandParser	DOM
Chub	ChubParser	DOM
Duck.ai (DuckDuckGo AI)	DuckAIParser	DOM
Generic Web Article	ArticleParser	Readability + Defuddle + Article-Extractor

All parsers extend the base ChatParser interface — a consistent isAvailable(url) + normalized parse() contract. For the full extraction-strategy breakdown and maintenance model, see SUPPORTED_PLATFORMS.md, also published as the platform matrix on the developer docs site.

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License

decant-core is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only).

That choice is deliberate. AI platforms change constantly, and parser fixes belong in a shared commons so the whole ecosystem benefits — not siloed in a proprietary fork. If you use decant-core, network-based deployments that serve modified versions must also offer the corresponding source. Please review LICENSE before incorporating it into your project.

Third-Party Test Fixtures Notice

Sample test fixtures located in tests/fixtures/ consist of third-party DOM snapshots and API response excerpts retained solely for automated regression testing and platform interoperability under fair use principles. They are excluded from the project's AGPL-3.0 license. See tests/fixtures/README.md for details.

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Used by

• AI Chat Exporter — export, archive and transfer AI conversations between platforms.
• Decant — the distraction-free web clipper and research batcher.

These products are demonstrations of the library, not its purpose. Yours can be next — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

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Development

Building, testing, and extending the library is covered in DEVELOPMENT.md; platform contributions follow the parser pattern and CLA in CONTRIBUTING.md.