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

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

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.

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.
- 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.

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