Extract title from URL in TEXT format

Hey @Coda_Whim ,
very good question actually.

Just to make sure we talk about the same thing:

1. There is HTML Title of a Website

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Like “Coda Maker Community”. Ths is an information in the head element of a website and stored in the same way for all websites. To access this part, you’d somehow need to open the website/fetch the html from the website.
The Coda Link Column (and Cards etc) fetches this information for you and shows it in the Coda UI. BUT there is no way I know of, to extract this information in Coda outside a URL column or Card. Not even with “Black Magic”, because even in the object of a Link Column you can only find the url, not the title.

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2. There can be a “Speaking URL” segment in an url

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For SEO and UI reasons, URLs often show some readable information. In many cases, a website uses the same information as the title, but this is highly individual. Some URLs have multiple “speaking” segments.

Theoretically you can parse this information. E.g. to get the segment from a community link, you can do it with

thisRow.URL.ToText().Split("/").Nth(5).Regexreplace("-", " ")

BUT this formula only works for links from the Coda Community and you will need a different formula for different websites.

Conclusion:
What sounds like a simple task (especially since you see the title in the column already!) is actually not easy to pull off.

As far as i know: If you want to get the speaking url segment from URLs that are always build in the same way, you can do it. If you want the speaking segment from multiple websites or even the HTML title, I don’t think you can do it right now.

You can post a feature request in the Suggestion Box!

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