lassie: Retrieve Structured Content from Websites

Overview

Lassie retrieves basic content from a website URL and returns it as structured data. Its example shows page metadata alongside images, video embeds, keywords, and locale, helping applications avoid manually parsing each page's HTML.

It is aimed at Python developers building tools or services that need to turn a web page into useful content fields. Consider it when basic page retrieval and metadata extraction are enough, rather than a full browser-based rendering or crawling system.

Key Features

• Fetches content from a supplied website URL through lassie.fetch.
• Returns page title, description, and URL in a structured result.
• Extracts image and video details, including source URLs and available dimensions or types.
• Includes keywords and locale when present in the page data.
• Provides a Python library interface suitable for integrating retrieval into an application.

Use Cases

• A Python application can generate link previews with a page title, description, and images.
• A content-management workflow can collect basic metadata when editors submit a URL.
• A social or media tool can retrieve video embed information alongside page details.
• Developers can prototype URL-based content extraction without writing their own metadata parser.

Getting Started

Install with pip:

pip install lassie

See the README and documentation for usage details.

Alternatives

• micawber: micawber focuses on rich link previews and embeds, while lassie extracts broader page metadata such as titles, descriptions, and images.
• newspaper: newspaper targets news articles, extracting full text, keywords, and summaries in addition to metadata, while lassie focuses on general page metadata.

Considerations

The provided example demonstrates basic extraction from a YouTube page, but the input does not specify broader site coverage or handling of JavaScript-rendered pages. The repository was last pushed in 2022 and is not marked archived, so check the documentation and current package state before relying on it for a new production integration.