API for getting contact info about College or University? - database

Question

There are lots of resources for getting name, website, accreditation info, etc for higher education institutions such as the College Scorecard API or IPEDS. What I need for this project is to find a general contact information email address for my set of a few hundred colleges and universities. I plan on using Google Sheets and Apps Script to collect this data.
I have a spreadsheet such as
| Name | URL | City | State | Email |
|-----------------------|----------------------|-----------------|-------|-------|
| Prairie State College | www.prairiestate.edu | Chicago Heights | IL | |
| Langston University | www.langston.edu | Langston | OK | |
where I need to fill in the "email" column. Does anyone know any APIs that could help with that? A quick Google search tells me that ldickerson#prairiestate.edu is the contact at Prairie State College, whereas the admissions page of Langston University has luadmissions#langston.edu right on it. Does anyone have any ideas on where I can pull this data from automatically?

Answer 1

There is no direct API that can help you achieve that.
What you can do instead is to use UrlFetchApp from Apps Script and retrieve the page text from the admission/contact pages wanted. Afterwards you can retrieve the email address from the page text retrieved using regex.
The below code does the mentioned above but depending on the page, it may retrieve more than one email address. If you know exactly that the first email in the list is the email address you actually need, you can call email[0] instead.
function findMail() {
var url ="ADMISSION_CONTACT_PAGE_URL";
var pageText = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url).getContentText();
var email = pageText.match(/([a-zA-Z0-9._-]+#[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/gi);
Logger.log(email);
}
Reference
UrlFetchApp Class Apps Script;
Regex Tester.