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Anybody know of any tools that would work with JS-rendered sites, and not have to "parse the JS"?
by egb 13y ago
Anybody know of any tools that would work with JS-rendered sites, and not have to "parse the JS"?
- checker659 13y agoPhantomJS?
- egb 13y ago"PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API", so it's a browser. Is it also a webscraper that can pull data out of a page for me?
- nols 13y agoI've heard of people using PhantomJS with CasperJS to scrape, not sure if it can be done solely with PhantomJS.
- vaviloff 13y agoCasperJS is a higher-level wrapper for PhantomJS, so - yes, it could be done with PhantomJS solely... But you wouldn't want to, because CasperJS makes automation easier.
- uptown 13y agoAre there any libraries to facilitate database-connectivity to SQL Server or MySQL from javascript? I've used CasperJS to scrape some sites, but always fall back on post-processing the scraped data with another program in order to get it into my database. I'd love to be able to do it all from one piece of code.
- gee_totes 13y agoYou could always have your CasperJS scraping script make an AJAX request to a RESTful API for your MySQL DB. You won't be doing it all from one piece of code, but you'll be doing about 90% of it.
- lost_my_pwd 13y agoSlimerJS too
- e1g 13y ago>Is it also a webscraper that can pull data out of a page for me? No, Phantom will only recreate the page as it would look like to a human user (i.e. after all javascript is parsed and executed). It will not help you parse or slice the page - you would have to do that part programatically with other dom-parsing tools.
- checker659 13y agoSorry. I guess you're right. As a programmer, both of those look the same to me.
- egb 13y agoAnswering my own question: CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for the PhantomJS WebKit headless browser and SlimerJS (Gecko). It eases the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides useful high-level functions, methods & syntactic sugar for doing common tasks such as: defining & ordering browsing navigation steps filling & submitting forms clicking & following links capturing screenshots of a page (or part of it) testing remote DOM logging events downloading resources, including binary ones writing functional test suites, saving results as JUnit XML scraping Web contents
- mopoke 13y agoI wrote a blog post on my experiences using CasperJS to parse a single page site which used angular. http://www.andykelk.net/tech/web-scraping-with-casperjs http://www.andykelk.net/tech/web-scraping-with-casperjs
- CMCDragonkai 13y agoI recently created a service designed to make JS sites crawlable by search engines and other robots. However it works for scraping as well. Try the demo: https://snapsearch.io/ https://snapsearch.io/