Cookbook

The Cookbook is a collection of task-first recipes for mq. Where the Example page walks through mq’s features, each Cookbook page starts from a real problem (“I want to do X”) and gets straight to a working query.

How a recipe is structured

Every recipe follows the same four parts:

• Goal: the problem being solved, in one sentence.
• Prerequisites: anything the input or environment needs (a module import, an mq flag, a document shape).
• Query: the mq query or command to run.
• Output: the result you should see.

Selecting and filtering content

• Generate a table of contents from headings
• Extract code blocks by language
• Extract a specific row from a table
• Get the Nth item from every list
• Extract MDX components
• Extract all URLs from links
• Find images missing alt text
• Extract blockquotes as pull quotes
• Extract footnote definitions
• Find raw HTML blocks

Working with sections

• Extract a section by its heading
• Keep only sections at a given heading level
• Split a document into chunks at a heading level
• Delete a section by its heading
• Find sections that have no content
• Find which section a node belongs to

Working with tables

• Extract all tables from a document
• Add a row to a table
• Convert a Markdown table to CSV
• Convert CSV to a Markdown table
• Fill blank cells in a CSV column
• Fill blank cells in a Markdown table
• Reshape a table between wide and long form

Functions and data

• Write a reusable custom function
• Transform, filter, and reduce arrays
• Extract frontmatter metadata
• Bump a version string across a file
• Track task-list (checkbox) progress
• Count words in a document
• Inline local images as base64
• Sort versions and find the latest release
• Find the closest heading to a misspelled name

Working with data formats

• Turn JSON into a Markdown table
• Generate Markdown from data
• Convert between YAML and JSON
• Read values from a TOML file
• Read values from an XML file
• Convert between XML and JSON
• Query XML with XPath
• Flatten JSON into greppable paths
• Compact JSON with TOON for LLM prompts
• Decode a CBOR payload
• Extract links from an HTML page

Parsing text formats and command output

• Parse LTSV logs
• Turn command output into structured data

Fetching over the network

• Fetch a web page and filter it

Multi-file and LLM workflows

• Merge multiple Markdown files into one stream
• Control when large file sets run in parallel
• Generate an XML sitemap from Markdown files
• Trim a document down to LLM-sized context
• Generate document statistics

Looking for a full tour of mq’s selectors and built-in functions instead? See the Example page.