AcademicUrlTitles is a Limnoria/Supybot plugin for pulling URLs pasted into IRC channels and displaying information about the page/content.

This plugin is oriented around academic settings where commonly posted links will include PDFs, videos and datasets. Since this plugin was originally written to run in ##machinelearning on FreeNode, it includes integrations for arXiv.

This plugin is forked from Detroll. Improvements include SSL support (with optional fallback with warnings about bad certs), replacing faulty urllib2, PDF title parsing, better URL extraction, arXiv integration, and numerous stability and readability improvements.

Installation is simple: clone this repo to your bot's plugins directory:

cd bot-directory/plugins
git clone https://github.com/brandonrobertz/AcademicUrlTitles

Then restart your bot or load it over IRC:

<brand0>: @load AcademicUrlTitles
<AcademicTitles>: The operation succeeded.

Here's the bot in action:

<brand0> https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.02672.pdf
<AcademicTitles> [ [1507.02672] Semi-Supervised Learning with Ladder Networks ]

<brand0> http://journalism.stanford.edu/cj2016/files/What%20do%20journalists%20do%20with%20documents.pdf
<AcademicTitles> [ What do journalists do with documents 7 (application/pdf, 5 pages) 211.0KB ]

<brand0> https://expired.badssl.com/
<AcademicTitles> [ (WARNING: BAD CERT) expired.badssl.com ]

<brand0> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgYvHyT15E
<AcademicTitles> [ NIPS 2016 Workshop on Adversarial Training - Ian Goodfellow - Introduction to GANs - YouTube ]

The bot will show you if the link was redirected, and what domain it was redirected to:

<brand0> http://www.facebook.com
<AcademicTitles> [ (R: HTTPS) Facebook - Log In or Sign Up ]

<brand0> https://developer.facebook.com
<AcademicTitles> [ (R: developers.facebook.com) Facebook for Developers ]

If the server returns an unusual status code, the bot shows that too:

<brand0> https://arxiv.org/sfdkjs09r8we
<AcademicTitles> [ (404) Not found ]

This plugin requires the following Python modules:

• PyPDF2
• requests
• BeautifulSoup*
• lxml (optional - improves parsing of title attribute)

• Avoid BeautifulSoup version 3.1 as it has serious problems dealing with pages that contain some common JavaScript. If your Linux distribution includes the 3.1 version of BeautifulSoup, remove it and use easy_install to install 3.2 or newer.