Re: Is there a better (built-in) way to insert an org link with title as description?

[Arthur Miller]

Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:

Hi thank you for the thorough and well-informed answer.

> On 19/07/2023 19:06, Arthur Miller wrote:
>> I want to auto insert a title from an HTML page as description for an org 
>> link in
>> my notes.
>> (defun org-link-from-clipboard ()
> ...
>>        (url-retrieve url
>>         (lambda (buffer)
>>           (goto-char (point-min))
>>           (when (re-search-forward "<title>\\(.*\\)</title>" nil t)
>
> What are origins of your links?

> If it is an URL opened in browser then `org-capture' or
> org-protocol:/store-link/ may be used. There are a number of browser 
> extensions
> for that.

I do use org-protocol, and I do have it in my FFX, so I am aware of it. But
sometimes I copy a link from a readme file or a piece of code or elsewhere and
wish to stash it away in a note but not necessary open in a browser. You know,
"todo" to come back later for it :).

> More metadata sometimes desired and just page title is not enough. For
> extracting it within Emacs see e.g. Ihor's
> https://github.com/yantar92/org-capture-ref
> Search for its discussions on this mailing lists.
>
> Some complications:
> - titles may have &...; entities
> - Not all pages have <title>, so heuristics have to be used.
Yepp, I am aware, the goal was not to be 100% fool proof. I had experienced
sometimes a couple of characters that Emacs can't dissambiguate, but it is not a
problem and yes, in case of no title it will prompt; the other strategy I used
was to return just url itself or "no description". Perhaps I should revert to
just the url.

> - Some HTML files contains nothing besides JavaScript to load actual content
> - Some URLs are from minifiers or obfuscated by Outlook "protection",
>   trampolines to prevent leaking of data through the Referer header, etc. 
> Likely
>  redirection target should be saved, not original URL.
> - Some sites like GitHub have API that allows to get metadata in JSON format. 
> It
>  is better than parsing HTML with regexp.

Yes, I am aware and completely agree with you!

Luckely I am getting quite old by now and don't visit too many sites or sites of
dubious JS character, so for my needs IDC :).

Miros idea served me well for several years now, I just improved it a bit the
other day to skip prmpting for the URL and used asynchornous download to skip
that slight second or two of delay in some links.

> Anyway I suggest to split non-interactive part of the command to allow code
> reuse (for drag and drop, etc.).

Tell me more here? Can I drag a link from one buffer into a note buffer, or how
can I use it?

Thank you for the answer.