Typescript library (29.2kb unpacked) that allows you to extract information from a HTTP url/link and/or parse text and retrieve information from the first available link.
BROWSERS DO NOT ALLOW YOU TO DO CROSS ORIGIN REQUESTS (CORS), you cannot request a different domain from your web app, period.
If do not know how same-origin-policy works you can read this
This library therefore works on node (back-end environments) and certain mobile run-times (cordova or react-native)
As Google continues to wage war upon the internet and break it on all the ways only convenient to Google, sometimes it's domains break the standards, to be more specific: www.google.com does not return a required meta data and YouTube does funny re-directions on mobile which also causes this library to return wrong data... 🖕 Google, feel free to submit a PR if you want to accommodate the trillion dollar corporation.
yarn add link-preview-js
getLinkPreview: you have to pass a string, doesn't matter if it is just a URL or a piece of text that contains a URL, the library will take care of parsing it and returning the info of first valid HTTP(S) URL info it finds. (URL parsing is done via: https://gist.github.com/dperini/729294).
getPreviewFromContent: useful for passing a pre-fetched Response object from an existing async/etc. call. Refer to example below for required object values.
import { getLinkPreview, getPreviewFromContent } from 'link-preview-js';
// pass the link directly
getLinkPreview('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c')
.then((data) => console.debug(data));
////////////////////////// OR //////////////////////////
// pass a chunk of text
getLinkPreview('This is a text supposed to be parsed and the first link displayed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c')
.then((data) => console.debug(data));
////////////////////////// OR //////////////////////////
// pass a pre-fetched response object
// The passed response object should include, at minimum:
// {
// data: '<!DOCTYPE...><html>...', // response content
// headers: {
// ...
// // should include content-type
// content-type: "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1",
// ...
// },
// url: 'https://domain.com/' // resolved url
// }
yourAjaxCall(url, (response) => {
getPreviewFromContent(response)
.then((data) => console.debug(data));
})Additionally you can pass an options object which should add more functionality to the parsing of the link
| Property Name | Result |
|---|---|
| imagesPropertyType (optional) (ex: 'og') | Fetches images only with the specified property, meta[property='${imagesPropertyType}:image'] |
| headers (optional) (ex: { 'user-agent': 'googlebot', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US' }) | Add request headers to fetch call |
getLinkPreview("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c", {
imagesPropertyType: "og", // fetches only open-graph images
headers: {
"user-agent": "googlebot" // fetches with googlebot crawler user agent
"Accept-Language": "fr-CA", // fetches site for French language
// ...other optional HTTP request headers
}
}).then(data => console.debug(data));Returns a Promise that resolves with an object describing the provided link. The info object returned varies depending on the content type (MIME type) returned in the HTTP response (see below for variations of response). Rejects with an error if response can not be parsed or if there was no URL in the text provided.
{
url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c",
title: "OK Go - Needing/Getting - Official Video - YouTube",
siteName: "YouTube",
description: "Buy the video on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/needing-getting-bundle-ep/id508124847 See more about the guitars at: http://www.gretschguitars.com...",
images: ["https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MejbOFk7H6c/maxresdefault.jpg"],
mediaType: "video.other",
contentType: "text/html; charset=utf-8",
videos: [],
favicons:["https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_32-vflOogEID.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_48-vflVjB_Qk.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_96-vflW9Ec0w.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_144-vfliLAfaB.png","https://s.ytimg.com/yts/img/favicon-vfl8qSV2F.ico"]
}{
url: "https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/04/27/gettyimages-656523922nunes-4bb9a194ab2986834622983bb2f8fe57728a9e5f-s1100-c15.jpg",
mediaType: "image",
contentType: "image/jpeg",
favicons: [ "https://media.npr.org/favicon.ico" ]
}{
url: "https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2007/12/20071231_atc_13.mp3",
mediaType: "audio",
contentType: "audio/mpeg",
favicons: [ "https://ondemand.npr.org/favicon.ico" ]
}{
url: "https://www.w3schools.com/html/mov_bbb.mp4",
mediaType: "video",
contentType: "video/mp4",
favicons: [ "https://www.w3schools.com/favicon.ico" ]
}{
url: "https://assets.curtmfg.com/masterlibrary/56282/installsheet/CME_56282_INS.pdf",
mediaType: "application",
contentType: "application/pdf",
favicons: [ "https://assets.curtmfg.com/favicon.ico" ]
}MIT license