Scrape information from meta data with Javascript

Question

I wonder how I can scrape how I can scrape of author affiliation from a page like this:

The information that I want is stored in a meta-tag that looks like this:

<meta name="citation_author_institution" content="Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta">

I tried something like this:

var affiliation = doc.getElementsByTagName('meta').item(property='citation_author_institution');

But this didn't seem to work for me. Can someone enlighten please

This works for me in Chrome: document.getElementsByTagName('meta')['citation_author_institution'] — Reeno
– Reeno, Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 8:12
Okay, how do you check if it works? I'm maybe doing something wrong when I check — anderssinho
– anderssinho, Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 8:23
That's the element itself (e.g. document.getElementsByTagName('meta')['citation_author_institution']) and not one of the properties (e.g. document.getElementsByTagName('meta')['citation_author_institution'].content - note the .content at the end) — Reeno
– Reeno, Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 9:33
Yes, then you get the content of the property content. If it's <meta name="abc" description="def"> you'd need document.getElementsByTagName('meta')['abc'].description — Reeno
– Reeno, Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 9:41

anderssinho · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-28 09:46:12Z

1

Thx to the user Reeno, I finally got the content of this meta tag that I needed. Here is the final code:

var affiliation = doc.getElementsByTagName('meta')[property='citation_author_institution'].content;

answered Oct 28, 2015 at 9:46

anderssinho

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