Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by egb on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @12:42PM
(#7509598)
Anybody know of any tools that would work with JS-rendered sites, and not have to "parse the JS"?
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Answering 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
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by mopoke on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @04:42AM
(#7514282)
I 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
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by CMCDragonkai on Thursday April 03, 2014 @02:03AM
(#7521221)
I 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/
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by checker659 on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @12:45PM
(#7509626)
PhantomJS?
>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.
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by checker659 on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @01:25PM
(#7509995)
Sorry. I guess you're right. As a programmer, both of those look the same to me.
"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?
I've heard of people using PhantomJS with CasperJS to scrape, not sure if it can be done solely with PhantomJS.
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by vaviloff on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @02:21PM
(#7510494)
CasperJS 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.
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by uptown on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @02:37PM
(#7510633)
Are 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.
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by gee_totes on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @04:56PM
(#7511610)
You 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.
Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper
by lost_my_pwd on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @12:49PM
(#7509664)
SlimerJS too