picking-a-format

picking-a-format is a skill for Claude Code from xberg-io/xberg. It costs 56 tokens per session (929 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for selecting how extracted documents should be printed and formatted, including plain text, Markdown, HTML, JSON, and other formats. It distinguishes the format of the command's output from the format of the document content inside it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when configuring document extraction for AI prompts, vector search, batch processing, tables, images, and structured data.
Why use it?
It prevents mismatches between an extraction result and the system that will consume it, such as an AI model, search index, parser, or archive.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the xberg plugin — 7 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it when configuring document extraction for AI prompts, vector search, batch processing, tables, images, and structured data.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xberg-io/xberg/picking-a-format
About the project

Xberg is a document-intelligence engine that reads files, URLs, archives, and source trees and extracts text, metadata, images, tables, and structured data, with additional code-language understanding. Developers use it through language bindings, a command-line tool, REST API, or MCP server, and the catalogue entries support those integrations.

xberg-io/xberg · 9,275 stars · on GitHub · docs.xberg.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add xberg-io/xberg --skill picking-a-format
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install xberg, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for picking-a-format

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xberg-io/xberg/picking-a-format.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xberg-io/xberg/picking-a-format)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xberg-io/xberg/picking-a-format"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xberg-io/xberg/picking-a-format.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 56 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 929 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00056 $0.00929
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00464
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00093

Measured 8d ago against content hash ccbe0afc66cf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

picking-a-format scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugin/.ai-rulez/skills/picking-a-format/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Picking a format

Xberg has two orthogonal format knobs. Get them right up front and the downstream code stays simple.

Knob What it controls Values Default
--format How the CLI prints the result text, json, toon text (extract), json (batch)
--content-format How extracted content is rendered inside result plain, markdown, djot, html, json, doctags plain
--token-reduction Strip whitespace / boilerplate for LLM contexts off, light, moderate, aggressive, maximum off

--format json returns an envelope wrapping the ExtractedDocument — the document lives under .result for extract and under .results[] for batch, with content, metadata, tables, and images as fields of that nested document. --format text prints just content. --content-format is what shows up inside that content field.

Decision tree

Who consumes the output?
├── LLM (Claude, GPT, Gemini, local) — embed/prompt context
│       --format text --content-format markdown
├── Vector store / RAG indexer
│       --format json --content-format markdown
│       (markdown preserves structure for chunking)
├── Downstream parser that expects machine-readable JSON
│       --format json --content-format plain
│       (cleanest text + structured metadata)
├── Human review / archival
│       --format text --content-format markdown
├── HTML re-rendering / web display
│       --format json --content-format html
├── Lossless intermediate for pandoc / academic tooling
│       --format json --content-format djot
└── Token-budget-constrained pipeline
        --format text --content-format plain
        (drops markup; add --token-reduction moderate for further savings)

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 98 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A ccbe0afc66cf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

picking-a-format is a skill published in the GitHub repository xberg-io/xberg (9,275 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 929 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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