---
id: micawber
version: "0.7.0"
license: unclear
license_treatment: unclear
maintenance: active
---

# micawber — a small library for extracting rich content from urls

License: unclear · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 205.6K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Micawber is a small library for fetching and embedding rich media metadata from URLs. It wraps the oEmbed standard, allowing you to query URLs (especially video and image links) and receive structured metadata like title, author, thumbnail, and embed HTML. The library ships with built-in provider rules for common platforms and can parse blocks of text or HTML, automatically replacing bare links with embedded content.

You typically use it by bootstrapping a provider registry, then either requesting metadata for a single URL or parsing a larger text block to replace all recognized links with embeds. It depends only on beautifulsoup4 for HTML parsing and requires Python 3.8+.

Use it for:

- Fetch metadata (title, thumbnail, embed code) for a YouTube or Flickr link in a blog or content management system.
- Parse a user-submitted text block and automatically replace bare video URLs with embedded players.
- Build a link preview feature that shows rich metadata (author, title, image) before a user clicks.
- Extract structured data from media URLs for indexing or display in a feed or gallery.
- Convert raw HTML containing media links into HTML with embedded content widgets.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Extracts rich metadata (title, author, thumbnail, embed HTML) from URLs to videos, images, and other media, and replaces links in text or HTML with embedded content.

Yes. The package is actively maintained, has low install friction, no known vulnerabilities, and solves a real problem—extracting and embedding media metadata—with a minimal dependency footprint. The only caveat is that its license is not clearly documented; verify it in the repository before use in proprietary projects.

## Install

pip install micawber
uv add micawber
poetry add micawber

## Installing micawber

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with a single runtime dependency (beautifulsoup4). Actively maintained as of 2026-07-05, with recent commits and 680 repository stars.

License in practice: License status is unclear—no SPDX identifier or raw license text is recorded. Verify the actual license in the repository before using in proprietary or copyleft-sensitive projects.

Quickstart:

pip install micawber

import micawber
providers = micawber.bootstrap_basic()
result = providers.request('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XHDUOHuzU')
print(result['title'], result['thumbnail_url'])

Requires Python 3.8 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Which providers (YouTube, Flickr, etc.) are included in bootstrap_basic() and whether additional providers can be registered.
- Whether the library handles rate limiting or caching for repeated requests to the same URL.
- How the library behaves when a URL is unreachable or does not return oEmbed metadata.

## Package facts

- License: not declared (unclear)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 205.6K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

extract metadata from urls, embed video from link, rich content extraction, url to embed html, parse links to media, youtube video metadata, oEmbed provider, oEmbed, media-metadata, link-embedding

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/micawber) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/micawber/)