For a given URL, webpreview extracts its title, description, and image url using
Open Graph, Twitter Card, or
Schema meta tags, or, as an alternative, parses it as a generic webpage.
pip install webpreview
Use the generic webpreview method (added in v1.7.0) to parse the page independent of its nature.
This method fetches a page and tries to extracts a title, description, and a preview image from it.
It first attempts to parse the values from Open Graph properties, then it falls back to Twitter Card format, and then to Schema. If none of these methods succeed in extracting all three properties, then the web page's content is parsed using a generic HTML parser.
>>> from webpreview import webpreview
>>> p = webpreview("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi")
>>> p.title
'Enrico Fermi - Wikipedia'
>>> p.description
'Italian-American physicist (1901–1954)'
>>> p.image
'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg/1200px-Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg'
# Access the parsed fields both as attributes and items
>>> p["url"] == p.url
True
# Check if all three of the title, description, and image are in the parsing result
>>> p.is_complete()
True
# Provide page content from somewhere else
>>> content = """
<html>
<head>
<title>The Dormouse's story</title>
<meta property="og:description" content="A Mad Tea-Party story" />
</head>
<body>
<p class="title"><b>The Dormouse's story</b></p>
<a href="http://example.com/elsie" class="sister" id="link1">Elsie</a>
</body>
</html>
"""
# The the function's invocation won't make any external calls,
# only relying on the supplied content, unlike the example above
>>> webpreview("aa.com", content=content)
WebPreview(url="http://aa.com", title="The Dormouse's story", description="A Mad Tea-Party story")
When webpreview is installed via pip, then the accompanying command-line tool is
installed alongside.
$ webpreview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
title: Enrico Fermi - Wikipedia
description: Italian-American physicist (1901–1954)
image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg/1200px-Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg
$ webpreview https://github.com/ --absolute-url
title: GitHub: Where the world builds software
description: GitHub is where over 83 million developers shape the future of software, together.
image: https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/social-cards/github-social.png
Before v1.7.0 the package mainly exposed a different set of the API methods. All of them are supported and may continue to be used.
# WARNING:
# The API below is left for BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY ONLY.
from webpreview import web_preview
title, description, image = web_preview("aurl.com")
# specifing timeout which gets passed to requests.get()
title, description, image = web_preview("a_slow_url.com", timeout=1000)
# passing headers
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
title, description, image = web_preview("a_slow_url.com", headers=headers)
# pass html content thus avoiding making http call again to fetch content.
content = """<html><head><title>Dummy HTML</title></head></html>"""
title, description, image = web_preview("aurl.com", content=content)
# specifing the parser
# by default webpreview uses 'html.parser'
title, description, image = web_preview("aurl.com", content=content, parser='lxml')
The docker image can be built and ran similarly to the command line.
The default entry point is the webpreview command-line function.
$ docker build -t webpreview .
$ docker run -it --rm webpreview "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi"
title: Enrico Fermi - Wikipedia
description: Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age"[1] and the "architect of the atomic bomb".
image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg/1200px-Enrico_Fermi_1943-49.jpg
Note: built docker image weighs around 210MB.
# Execute the tests
poetry run pytest webpreview
# OR execute until the first failed test
poetry run pytest webpreview -x
# Install a correct minimal supported version of python
pyenv install 3.7.13
# Create a virtual environment
# By default, the project already contains a .python-version file that points
# to 3.7.13.
python -m venv .venv
# Install dependencies
# Poetry will automatically install them into the local .venv
poetry install
# If you have errors likes this:
ERROR: Can not execute `setup.py` since setuptools is not available in the build environment.
# Then do this:
.venv/bin/pip install --upgrade setuptools
FAQs
Extracts OpenGraph, TwitterCard and Schema properties from a webpage.
We found that webpreview demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 1 open source maintainer collaborating on the project.
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
Research
Security News
Malicious Go packages are impersonating popular libraries to install hidden loader malware on Linux and macOS, targeting developers with obfuscated payloads.
Security News
Bybit's $1.46B hack by North Korea's Lazarus Group pushes 2025 crypto losses to $1.6B in just two months, already surpassing all of 2024's $1.49B total.
Security News
OpenSSF has published OSPS Baseline, an initiative designed to establish a minimum set of security-related best practices for open source software projects.