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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T05:35:08+00:00

Is there a way to query Stack Overflow directly from the command line and

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Is there a way to query Stack Overflow directly from the command line and get back the most upvoted answer to the first question that comes up for that query?

I really mislike having to open up my browser whenever I want to brush up on my knowledge of writing RegExes for matching XHTML tags.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Yes, it is possible! Try out Benjamin Gleitzman’s excellent tool howdoi.

    It works like this:

    $ howdoi get stackoverflow answers inside a terminal

    and the program will query StackOverflow for keywords "get stackoverflow answers inside a terminal", find the question that best matches these terms and return the code from the best answer to that question.

    You can also add the -a option to get the full answer, not just the code. So to get an answer for your example query, you would do:

    $ howdoi -a RegEx match XHTML tags

    Installation

    If you have Python & pip installed, you can get it from the Cheese shop.

    $ pip install howdoi

    More help

    Enter howdoi -h for complete usage instructions.

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