How to get page title in requests

Question

What would be the simplest way to get the title of a page in Requests?

r = requests.get('http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/') # ? r.title Friends (TV Series 1994–2004) - IMDb 

Answer 1

You need an HTML parser to parse the HTML response and get the title tag's text:

Example using lxml.html:

>>> import requests >>> from lxml.html import fromstring >>> r = requests.get('http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/') >>> tree = fromstring(r.content) >>> tree.findtext('.//title') u'Friends (TV Series 1994\u20132004) - IMDb' 

There are certainly other options, like, for example, mechanize library:

>>> import mechanize >>> br = mechanize.Browser() >>> br.open('http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108778/') >>> br.title() 'Friends (TV Series 1994\xe2\x80\x932004) - IMDb' 

What option to choose depends on what are you going to do next: parse the page to get more data, or, may be, you want to interact with it: click buttons, submit forms, follow links etc.

Besides, you may want to use an API provided by IMDB, instead of going down to HTML parsing, see:

• Does IMDB provide an API?
• IMDbPY

Example usage of an IMDbPY package:

>>> from imdb import IMDb >>> ia = IMDb() >>> movie = ia.get_movie('0108778') >>> movie['title'] u'Friends' >>> movie['series years'] u'1994-2004'