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Webpage Meta Extractor

by Nicholas C. Zakas

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Description

A utility for extracting metadata from a webpage in a consistent way that makes it easy to work with.

Requires a DOM document with querySelector() and querySelectorAll(), such as:

Installation

npm install @humanwhocodes/webpage-meta-extractor

Usage

Basic Example

import { WebpageMetaExtractor } from "@humanwhocodes/webpage-meta-extractor";
import { JSDOM } from "jsdom";

const html = `
<html><head>
  <meta property="og:title" content="Example Title" />
  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
  <meta name="description" content="A description." />
  <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
  <title>Fallback Title</title>
</head></html>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html);

const extractor = new WebpageMetaExtractor();
const meta = extractor.extract(dom.window.document);

console.log(meta.title); // "Example Title"
console.log(meta.description); // "A description."
console.log(meta.favicon); // "/favicon.ico" (prefers SVG, then PNG 32x32+, then ICO, then fallback)
console.log(meta.favicons); // Array of Favicon objects
console.log(meta.openGraph); // Map { 'title' => [ 'Example Title' ] }
console.log(meta.twitterCard); // Map { 'card' => [ 'summary' ] }
console.log(meta.meta); // Map { 'description' => [ 'A description.' ] }

Microdata Example

const html = `
<html><body>
  <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    <span itemprop="name">Alice</span>
    <span itemprop="jobTitle">Engineer</span>
  </div>
</body></html>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html);
const extractor = new WebpageMetaExtractor();
const meta = extractor.extract(dom.window.document);
console.log(meta.microdata);
// [
//   {
//     type: ["http://schema.org/Person"],
//     name: "Alice",
//     jobTitle: "Engineer"
//   }
// ]

API

WebpageMetaExtractor

  • extract(document) — Extracts meta information from a DOM Document. Throws TypeError if input is invalid. Returns a WebpageMeta instance.

WebpageMeta properties

  • canonicalUrl — The canonical URL for the page, if found (from <link rel="canonical">).
  • openGraph — Map of Open Graph meta tags (without og: prefix)
  • twitterCard — Map of Twitter Card meta tags (without twitter: prefix)
  • meta — Map of other meta tags
  • other — Map of other extracted data (icon, shortcut icon, <title>, first <h1>)
  • feeds — Array of discovered feeds
  • favicons — Array of all favicon candidates found on the page. Each item is a Favicon object with:
    • rel (string): The rel attribute
    • type (string, optional): The type attribute
    • href (string): The href attribute
    • sizes (string, optional): The sizes attribute
  • favicon — Favicon URL (string, selected by preference: SVG > PNG 32x32+ > ICO > fallback)
  • favicon — Favicon URL (string, selected by preference: SVG > PNG 32x32+ > ICO > fallback). Note: In addition to the correct SVG MIME type image/svg+xml, this library also treats the incorrect but sometimes used image/svg as SVG for improved compatibility.
  • title — Page title (string or undefined)
  • description — Page description (string or undefined)
  • image — Page image URL (string or undefined)
  • url — Canonical URL (string or undefined)
  • siteName — Site name (string or undefined)
  • jsonld — Array of all JSON-LD data found in <script type="application/ld+json"> tags. Each element is a parsed JSON object.
  • images — Array of all Open Graph images found on the page. Each item is a WebpageImage object with:
    • url (string): The image URL
    • secureUrl (string, optional): The secure image URL
    • type (string, optional): The image MIME type
    • width (string, optional): The image width
    • height (string, optional): The image height
    • alt (string, optional): The image alt text
  • videos — Array of all Open Graph videos found on the page. Each item is a WebpageVideo object with:
    • url (string): The video URL
    • secureUrl (string, optional): The secure video URL
    • type (string, optional): The video MIME type
    • width (string, optional): The video width
    • height (string, optional): The video height
    • alt (string, optional): The video alt text
  • openGraphObject — Returns an object representing the Open Graph object for the current page, based on the value of og:type. For any type, includes all properties in the format og:type:property (e.g., article:published_time, profile:first_name), with keys in their original format (not camelCase) and values from the Open Graph map. If a property occurs more than once, the value is an array. If the type is unknown or not present, returns an empty object.
  • microdata — Array of all top-level microdata items found in the page, based on the WHATWG microdata JSON extraction algorithm. Each entry is an object with optional type (array) and optional id (string), with microdata properties as direct keys on the object. Single-value properties are returned as strings, while multi-value properties are returned as arrays. Nested microdata objects follow the same structure.

Error Handling

  • Throws TypeError with message "Expected a DOM Document with querySelectorAll." if input is not a valid DOM Document.

Notes on HTML Entities

All meta tag content values are automatically unescaped (HTML entities such as &amp;, &lt;, &quot;, etc. are converted to their literal characters) during extraction. This ensures that the returned values are ready for use without further decoding.

Example with Feeds

const html = `
<html><head>
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/feed.xml" />
</head></html>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html);
const meta = extractor.extract(dom.window.document);
console.log(meta.feeds); // [ { title: 'RSS', type: 'application/rss+xml', href: '/feed.xml' } ]
Example: Extracting all Open Graph images
const html = `
<html><head>
  <meta property="og:image" content="img1.jpg" />
  <meta property="og:image:width" content="600" />
  <meta property="og:image:height" content="400" />
  <meta property="og:image:alt" content="First image" />
  <meta property="og:image:url" content="img2.jpg" />
  <meta property="og:image:width" content="800" />
  <meta property="og:image:alt" content="Second image" />
</head></html>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html);
const meta = extractor.extract(dom.window.document);
console.log(meta.images);
// [
//   {
//     url: "img1.jpg",
//     secureUrl: undefined,
//     type: undefined,
//     width: "600",
//     height: "400",
//     alt: "First image"
//   },
//   {
//     url: "img2.jpg",
//     secureUrl: undefined,
//     type: undefined,
//     width: "800",
//     height: undefined,
//     alt: "Second image"
//   }
// ]
Example: Extracting JSON-LD data
const html = `
<html><head>
  <script type="application/ld+json">
    {"@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Person", "name": "John Doe"}
  </script>
  <script type="application/ld+json">
    {"@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Acme Corp"}
  </script>
</head></html>
`;
const dom = new JSDOM(html);
const meta = extractor.extract(dom.window.document);
console.log(meta.jsonld);
// [
//   { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Person", "name": "John Doe" },
//   { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Acme Corp" }
// ]
Example: Extracting Open Graph object for an article
const meta = new WebpageMeta();
meta.openGraph.set("type", ["article"]);
meta.openGraph.set("article:published_time", ["2025-07-22T12:00:00Z"]);
meta.openGraph.set("article:author", ["https://example.com/author"]);
meta.openGraph.set("article:tag", ["tag1", "tag2"]);
console.log(meta.openGraphObject);
// {
//   publishedTime: "2025-07-22T12:00:00Z",
//   author: "https://example.com/author",
//   tag: ["tag1", "tag2"]
// }

License

Copyright 2025 Nicholas C. Zakas

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

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