How to get the title of a remote web page using javascript and NodeJS

(P) Codever is an open source bookmarks and snippets manager for developers & co. See our How To guides to help you get started. Public bookmarks repos on Github ⭐🙏

When I add a new bookmark to my bookmarks collection, I set the title of the new bookmark, most of the time, the same as the title of the web page being bookmark - I assume the authors have put some thought into it. To make this happen automatically, I am using a technique called web scraping¹. I cannot do it in front end (angular), since most of the URLs are outside of the https://www.codever.dev/ domain. So the magic happens in back end, in NodeJS, with the help of a library called cheerio², thank you Matthew for that. Cheerio is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of core jQuery³ designed specifically for the server. Read on to learn how this works.

Source code for Codever.dev is available on Github - Star

Check the dependencies

In the package.json make sure you have the cheerio and request dependencies:

     "name": "bookmarks-api.codepedia.org",
     "version": "1.0.0",
     "private": true,
     "scripts": {
       "start": "node ./bin/www"
     },
     "dependencies": {
       "body-parser": "~1.15.1",
       "cheerio": "latest",
       "cookie-parser": "~1.4.3",
       "debug": "~2.2.0",
       "express": "~4.13.4",
       "jade": "~1.11.0",
       "keycloak-connect": "2.5.0",
       "mongoose": "~4.3.7",
       "mongoose-unique-validator": "1.0.2",
       "morgan": "~1.7.0",
       "request": "latest",
       "serve-favicon": "~2.3.0",
       "showdown": "^1.6.4"
     },
     "devDependencies": {
       "nodemon": "^1.10.2"
     }
   }

Request⁴ is a simplified HTTP request client for NodeJS. It is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http calls.

Implementation

var express = require('express');
var request = require('request');
var cheerio = require('cheerio');
var router = express.Router();
var Bookmark = require('../models/bookmark');
var MyError = require('../models/error');

router.get('/scrape', function(req, res, next) {
  if(req.query.url){
    request(req.query.url, function (error, response, body) {
      if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
        const $ = cheerio.load(body);
        const webpageTitle = $("title").text();
        const metaDescription =  $('meta[name=description]').attr("content");
        const webpage = {
          title: webpageTitle,
          metaDescription: metaDescription
        }
        res.send(webpage);
      }
    });
  }
});

What happens?

The URL of the webpage comes as a url query parameter under the `/scrape resource. Then the web page with the URL is requested. If there is no error and we receive an HTTP 200 OK status the body of the response is loaded into cheerio.

With Cheerio we need to pass in the HTML document.

Once loaded we call the text()⁵ function to get the content of the title element and also identify the meta description content. We return them both in a custom webpage object. If I am not satisfied with the title or the description I can edit it manually after.

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A note on web scraping from Wikipedia - “the legality of web scraping varies across the world. In general, web scraping may be against the terms of use of some websites, but the enforceability of these terms is unclear”⁶. Since I am using the method to get the title for bookmarking and then reference back the link, Ì think I don’t do anything illegal, but be wary…

References