get title of current page

I am writing a plugin that records the page title when a page or post is viewed.

It appears the loop runs for each sub-page of a page (e.g. blog page) and I’m getting multiple titles. (If there are three sub-pages, I get three titles).

How do I get only the title of the page that is displayed to the site visitor? If they view the second sub-page, I want that title only, etc. — i.e. I want what is inside the HTML header <title>page name</title> tags.

I’ve tried different hooks into the loop and different code to retrieve the page title. I now think I need to do this

outside

the loop but don’t know how

Relevant portion of my code:

<?php
//add_action('init', 'wlog');
//add_action('wp_head', 'wlog');
add_action('wp', 'wlog');
//add_action('wp_footer', 'wlog');

$page_name = wp_title('', false);

Any help would be appreciated.