Get title of a page with cheerio

Question

I'm trying to get the title tag of a url with cheerio. But, I'm getting empty string values. This is my code:

app.get('/scrape', function(req, res){

    url = 'http://nrabinowitz.github.io/pjscrape/';

    request(url, function(error, response, html){
        if(!error){
                        var $ = cheerio.load(html);

            var title, release, rating;
            var json = { title : "", release : "", rating : ""};

            $('title').filter(function(){
                //var data = $(this);
                var data = $(this);
                        title = data.children().first().text();            
                        release = data.children().last().children().text();

                json.title = title;
                json.release = release;
            })

            $('.star-box-giga-star').filter(function(){
                var data = $(this);
                rating = data.text();

                json.rating = rating;
            })
        }


        fs.writeFile('output.json', JSON.stringify(json, null, 4), function(err){

            console.log('File successfully written! - Check your project directory for the output.json file');

        })

        // Finally, we'll just send out a message to the browser reminding you that this app does not have a UI.
        res.send('Check your console!')
    })
});

You are not handling the if (err) case make sure you add this and check if thats the case of error. — Risto Novik, Apr 27 '14 at 19:19

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 05 '15 at 12:16

24

request(url, function (error, response, body) 
{
  if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) 
  {
    var $ = cheerio.load(body);
    var title = $("title").text();
  }
})

Using Javascript we extract the text contained within the "title" tags.

answered Feb 05 '15 at 12:16

Robert Ryan

294
4
12

5

I'm using this and it works well: `$('head > title').text();` – Lukas Liesis Jul 19 '16 at 21:45
for me, this returns every title attribute in the DOM, concatenated into a single string. a more complex selector is necessary to get only the document title. – Arajay Nov 29 '22 at 23:25

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 08 '17 at 06:55

If Robert Ryan's solution still doesn't work, I'd be suspicious of the formatting of the original page, which may be malformed somehow.

In my case I was accepting gzip and other compression but never decoding, so Cheerio was trying to parse compressed binary bits. When console logging the original body, I was able to spot the binary text instead of plain text HTML.

Get title of a page with cheerio

2 Answers2

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