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A comment on Portia, an open-source visual web scraper. Parent comment

Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper by egb on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @12:48PM (#7509659)
"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?

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Re:Portia, an open-source visual web scraper by nols on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @12:54PM (#7509706)
I've heard of people using PhantomJS with CasperJS to scrape, not sure if it can be done solely with PhantomJS.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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