Create link previews on the client side, like in Facebook/LinkedIn

Question

I am creating a web app with an input box where the user can write anything, including URLs. I want to create a link preview like Facebook and LinkedIn does:

Scrape the given URL and display its main image and heading, without a server round-trip. Is there a way to do this in the browser?

Answer 1

After hours of googling I found the answer myself.. there is already a question in SO Is there open-source code for making 'link preview' text and icons, like in facebook? . So we can use this link http://api.embed.ly/1/oembed?url=YOUR-URL via http GET where we get the meta tags in json format.. I wrote my own code using JSdom and here goes the code...

Server side code:

app.post( '/scrapUrl/', function( req, res ) {

    var jsdom = require( 'jsdom' );
    var jsonRes = {};
    jsdom.env( {
        url: req.body.url,
        scripts: [ "http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js" ],
        done: function( error, window ) {
          var $ = window.$;

          $( 'meta' ).each( function() {
            var name = $( this ).attr( 'property' );
            var value = $( this ).attr( 'content' );
            if ( name ) {
              jsonRes[ name.slice( 3 ) ] = value;
              console.log( name + ": " + value );
            }
          } );
          res.send( jsonRes );
        }
    } );
} );

and the angular code

$http.post( '/scrapUrl/', {
    url: url  //send the url U need to scrape
} ).then( function( res ) {
    console.log(res.data)//U get the meta tags as json object
});

Once you get the JSON object you can display it in whatever style you want.