gemini-cli/docs/tools/web.md

Web Fetch Tool

This document describes the web_fetch tool.

web_fetch

• Purpose: Fetches text content from a given URL. This is useful for retrieving data from web pages, APIs, or other online resources.
• Arguments:
  • url (string, required): The absolute URL to fetch (e.g., https://example.com/data.txt).
• Behavior:
  • The tool attempts to retrieve the content from the specified URL.
  • It handles potential network errors (e.g., DNS resolution failure, connection timeout) and non-success HTTP status codes (e.g., 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error).
  • The returned content is expected to be text-based. For binary files, the behavior might be undefined or result in garbled text.
• Examples:
  • Fetching a plain text file:

    web_fetch(url="https://example.com/robots.txt")
    

  • Retrieving data from a simple API endpoint:

    web_fetch(url="https://api.example.com/items/123")
    

• Important Notes:
  • Content Type: This tool is primarily designed for text-based content. It may not be suitable for fetching binary files like images or executables.
  • Error Handling: Always check the tool's output for error messages or status indicators to ensure the fetch was successful and the content is as expected.
  • Rate Limiting/Authentication: Be mindful of website terms of service, rate limits, and authentication requirements. This tool does not inherently handle complex authentication mechanisms.