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Article Extraction API

The Article API is used to extract clean article text and other data from news articles, blog posts and other text-heavy pages. Retrieve the full-text, cleaned and normalized HTML, related images and videos, author, date, tags—automatically, from any article on any site.

Request

To use the Article API, perform a HTTP GET request on the following endpoint:

https://api.diffbot.com/v3/article

Provide the following arguments:

Argument	Description
token	Developer token
url	Web page URL of the article to process (URL encoded)
Optional arguments
fields	Used to specify optional fields to be returned by the Article API. See the Fields section below.
paging	Pass paging=false to disable automatic concatenation of multiple-page articles. (By default, Diffbot will concatenate up to 20 pages of a single article.) More on automatic concatenation.
maxTags	Set the maximum number of automatically-generated tags to return. By default a maximum of ten tags will be returned.
tagConfidence	Set the minimum relevance score of tags to return, between 0.0 and 1.0. By default only tags with a score equal to or above 0.5 will be returned.
discussion	Pass discussion=false to disable automatic extraction of article comments. See below.
timeout	Sets a value in milliseconds to wait for the retrieval/fetch of content from the requested URL. The default timeout for the third-party response is 30 seconds (30000).
callback	Use for jsonp requests. Needed for cross-domain ajax.
proxy	Used to specify the IP address of a custom proxy that will be used to fetch the target page, instead of Diffbot's default IPs/proxies. (Ex: &proxy=168.212.226.204)
proxyAuth	Used to specify the authentication parameters that will be used with the proxy specified in the &proxy parameter. (Ex: &proxyAuth=username:password)
naturalLanguage	Used to request the output of the Diffbot Natural Language API in the field naturalLanguage. Example: &naturalLanguage=entities,facts,categories,sentiment.

The fields argument

Use the fields argument to return optional fields in the JSON response. The default fields will always be returned. For nested arrays, use parentheses to retrieve specific fields, or * to return all sub-fields.

For example, to return links and meta (in addition to the default fields), your &fields argument would be:

&fields=links,meta

The naturalLanguage argument

The Diffbot Natural Language API is the service used by the Article API to extract tags and sentiment for an article. Use the naturalLanguage argument to receive the full output of the Natural Language API in the field naturalLanguage in the JSON response. Please refer to the Natural Language API documentation for a complete list of available fields, including all entities (such as people, organizations, products and topics) mentioned in the article as well as facts describing the relationships between them (such as Apple Inc; founded by; Steve Jobs).

Response

The Article API returns data in JSON format.

Each V3 response includes a request object (which returns request-specific metadata), and an objects array, which will include the extracted information for all objects on a submitted page. At the moment, only a single object will be returned for Article API requests.

Objects in the Article API's objects array will include the following fields:

Field	Description
type	Type of object (always article).
title	Title of the article.
text	Full text of the article.
html	Diffbot-normalized HTML of the extracted article. Please see the HTML Specification for a breakdown of elements and attributes returned.
date	Date of extracted article, normalized in most cases to RFC 1123 (HTTP/1.1).
estimatedDate	If an article's date is ambiguous, Diffbot will attempt to estimate a more specific timestamp using various factors. This will not be generated for articles older than two days, or articles without an identified date.
author	Article author.
authorUrl	URL of the author profile page, if available.
discussion	Article comments, as extracted by the Diffbot Discussion API. See below.
humanLanguage	Returns the (spoken/human) language of the submitted page, using two-letter ISO 639-1 nomenclature.
numPages	Number of pages automatically concatenated to form the text or html response. By default, Diffbot will automatically concatenate up to 20 pages of an article. More on automatic concatenation.
nextPages	Array of all page URLs concatenated in a multipage article. More on automatic concatenation.
siteName	The plain-text name of the site (e.g. The New York Times or Diffbot). If no site name is automatically determined, the root domain (diffbot.com) will be returned.
publisherRegion	If known, the region of the article publication.
publisherCountry	If known, the country of the article publication.
pageUrl	URL of submitted page / page from which the article is extracted.
resolvedPageUrl	Returned if the pageUrl redirects to another URL.
tags	Array of tags/entities, generated from analysis of the extracted text and cross-referenced with DBpedia and other data sources. Language-specific tags will be returned if the source text is in English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish or Russian.
↳label	Name of the entity or tag.
↳count	Number of appearances the entity makes within the text content.
↳score	Rating of the entity's relevance to the overall text content (range of 0 to 1) based on various factors.
↳rdfTypes	If the entity can be represented by multiple resources, all of the possible URIs will be returned.
↳type	This legacy field is a simplified precursor to rdfTypes, and will return either organization or person if the entity is either of those types.
↳uri	Link to the primary Diffbot entity for this tag in the Diffbot Knowledge Graph. On older articles, this might be the URI to the entity at DBpedia or another data source, but in most cases it will lead to Diffbot's KG entry which will contain more information about the tag.
images	Array of images, if present within the article body.
↳url	Fully resolved link to image. If the image SRC is encoded as base64 data, the complete data URI will be returned.
↳title	Description or caption of the image.
↳height	Height of image as (re-)sized via browser/CSS.
↳width	Width of image as (re-)sized via browser/CSS.
↳naturalHeight	Raw image height, in pixels.
↳naturalWidth	Raw image width, in pixels.
↳primary	Returns true if image is identified as primary based on visual analysis.
↳diffbotUri	Internal ID used for indexing.
videos	Array of videos, if present within the article body.
↳url	Fully resolved link to source video content.
↳naturalHeight	Source video height, in pixels, if available.
↳naturalWidth	Source video width, in pixels, if available.
↳primary	Returns true if video is identified as primary based on visual analysis.
↳diffbotUri	Internal ID used for indexing.
breadcrumb	Returns a top-level array (breadcrumb) of URLs and link text from page breadcrumbs.
diffbotUri	Unique object ID. The diffbotUri is generated from the values of various Article fields and uniquely identifies the object. This can be used for deduplication.
sentiment	Returns the sentiment score of the analyzed article text, a value ranging from -1.0 (very negative) to 1.0 (very positive).
Optional fields, available using fields= argument
quotes	Returns quotes found in the article text and who said them. For English-language text only.
links	Returns a top-level object (links) containing all hyperlinks found on the page.
meta	Returns a top-level object (meta) containing the full contents of page meta tags, including sub-arrays for OpenGraph tags, Twitter Card metadata, schema.org microdata, and -- if available -- oEmbed metadata.
querystring	Returns any key/value pairs present in the URL querystring. Items without a discrete value will be returned as true.
naturalLanguage	Returns the output of the Diffbot Natural Language API for this article.

Comment Extraction

By default the Article API will attempt to extract comments from article pages, using integrated functionality from the Diffbot Discussion API. Comment data will be returned in the discussion object (nested within the primary article object). The full syntax for discussion data is available in the Discussion API documentation.

Discussion extraction can be disabled using the argument discussion=false. Note that if a page has recently been processed by Diffbot, cached comments may be returned even if discussion=false is passed.

Authentication

You can supply Diffbot with basic authentication credentials or custom HTTP headers (see below) to access intranet pages or other sites that require a login.

Basic Authentication

To access pages that require a login/password (using basic access authentication), include the username and password in your url parameter, e.g.: url=http%3A%2F%2FUSERNAME:PASSWORD@www.diffbot.com.

Custom HTTP Headers and JavaScript

See here for a full guide on using custom headers in direct API calls.

Custom headers

You can supply Diffbot APIs with custom HTTP headers that will be passed along when making requests to third-party sites. These can be used to define specific Referer, User-Agent, Cookie or any other values.

Custom headers should be sent as HTTP headers in your request to https://api.diffbot.com, and prepended with X-Forward-.

For instance, to send custom User-Agent, Referer and My-Custom-Header header values:

Desired Header	Send to api.diffbot.com
User-Agent:Diffbot	X-Forward-User-Agent:Diffbot
Referer:diffbot.com	X-Forward-Referer:diffbot.com
My-Custom-Header:CustomValue	X-Forward-My-Custom-Header:CustomValue

Custom Javascript

This functionality is currently in beta.

Using the X-Evaluate custom header (sent as X-Forward-X-Evaluate), you can inject your own Javascript code into web pages. Custom Javascript will be executed once the DOM has loaded.

Custom Javascript should be provided as a text string and contained in its own function. You must also include the special functions start() and end() to indicate the beginning and end of your custom script. Once end() fires, the updated document will be processed by your chosen extraction API.

It's recommended that your end() function be offset using setTimeout (see JavaScript Timing Events) in order to accommodate your primary function processing. Additionally, if your custom Javascript requires access to Ajax-delivered content, it may be necessary to offset your entire function using setTimeout in order to delay the start of your processing.

The following sample X-Evaluate header waits one-half second after the DOM has loaded, enacts a click on the a.loadMore element, then waits 800 milliseconds before signaling the end():

function() {
    start();
    setTimeout(function() {
        var loadMoreNode = document.querySelector('a.loadMore');
        if (loadMoreNode != null) {
            loadMoreNode.click();
            setTimeout(function() {
                end();
            }, 800);
        } else {
            end();
        }
    }, 500);
}

Delivered as a string value as a custom header:

"X-Forward-X-Evaluate": "function() {start();setTimeout(function(){var loadMoreNode=document.querySelector('a.loadMore');if (loadMoreNode != null) {loadMoreNode.click();setTimeout(function(){end();}, 800);} else {end();}},500);}"

Note: X-Evaluate will only be executed if called from the API the rule resides in. If you have an X-Evaluate script in your Article API rule and make a request with the Analyze API that identifies the page as an article, the X-Evaluate will not be executed.

Posting Content

If your content is not publicly available (e.g., behind a firewall), you can POST markup or plain text directly to the Article API endpoint for analysis:

https://api.diffbot.com/v3/article?token=...&url=...

Please note that if you submit HTML, the url argument is still required, and will be used to resolve any relative links contained in the markup.

Provide the content to analyze as your POST body, and specify the Content-Type header as text/html (for full markup) or text/plain (for text-only).

HTML Post Sample

curl -H "Content-Type: text/html" -d '<html><body><p>Now is the time for all good robots to come to the aid of their-- oh never mind, run!</p></body></html>' 'https://api.diffbot.com/v3/article?token=...&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.diffbot.com'

Plaintext Post Sample

curl -H "Content-Type: text/plain" -d 'Now is the time for all good robots to come to the aid of their-- oh never mind, run!' 'https://api.diffbot.com/v3/article?token=...&fields=tags,text'