How can I retrieve the page title of a webpage using Python?

How can I retrieve the page title of a webpage (title html tag) using Python?

From stackoverflow

• I'll always use lxml for such tasks. You could use beautifulsoup as well.

  import lxml.html
  t = lxml.html.parse(url)
  print t.find(".//title").text
  

• This is probably overkill for such a simple task, but if you plan to do more than that, then it's saner to start from these tools (mechanize, BeautifulSoup) because they are much easier to use than the alternatives (urllib to get content and regexen or some other parser to parse html)

  Links: BeautifulSoup mechanize

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  #coding:utf-8
  
  from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
  from mechanize import Browser
  
  #This retrieves the webpage content
  br = Browser()
  res = br.open("https://www.google.com/")
  data = res.get_data() 
  
  #This parses the content
  soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
  title = soup.find('title')
  
  #This outputs the content :)
  print title.renderContents()
  

• The mechanize Browser object has a title() method. So the code from this post can be rewritten as:

  from mechanize import Browser
  br = Browser()
  br.open("http://www.google.com/")
  print br.title()
  

• @Vinko Vrsalovic

  Your example may be simplified.

  import urllib
  import BeautifulSoup
  
  soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(urllib.urlopen("https://www.google.com"))
  print soup.title.string
  

  NOTE:

  • soup.title finds the first title element anywhere in the html document

  • title.string assumes it has only one child node, and that child node is a string

• is there a way to not download the whole page, but only the first part, so a 'title' can be retrieved? It seems a bit useless to download a full page if you just want the title string.

  technomalogical : While you're downloading the full HTML of the page, I'm not sure if any of these libraries download the "full" page, including linked images, script files and style sheets (can someone confirm?) Usually, HTML is not the #1 offender when computing total size.