Automating Chrome

Question

I've seen some wild things happen when I paste some urlencoded Javascript into a URL on Firefox and Chrome. Is it possible to use this technique to tell Chrome to visit a URL and then save it as a file? I'm trying to automate Chrome, and Selenium looked extremely daunting.

EDIT: Unfortunately, I forgot to be more clear here. Let me explain. Things like wget, curl, etc. won't work because I have to get through logins in some of these scripts. And I've looked at iMacros, but found that I can't get them to run from command line except on Windows, unless I pay for the $499 package. Some other advantages of GCEs are that the dev platform is free and open to some degree, and they are cross-platform. (I use Linux.)

EDIT: At this point, I'm learning about Google Chrome Extensions. It appears they are easy to build and will let me (I think) tell the browser to open a new tab, go to a page, manipulate the DOM on that page (such as populating some fields and logging in), and then manipulate the DOM on the response page. GCEs don't let you do File I/O, so they are not like Firefox Extensions with XPCOM, but you can get around that by using AJAX to send data to a backend script (like a PHP script on a LAMP server) to save that data.

EDIT: By the way, and this is slightly off-topic (but I add to clarify) those "wild things" in Javascript that I mentioned were when you manipulate the DOM creating a URL that looks like so:

javascript:(function(){...your URL-encoded Javascript here...})();

Answer 1

The solution appears to be to make one's own Google Chrome Extension (GCE). It is easy to learn within about 4 hours if you know how to do slightly advanced Javascript stuff, and is very powerful. I can use the Tabs API to create a new tab and go to a specific URL. I can then inject jQuery into that URL and make it manipulate the DOM or do anything we normally can do with jQuery. I can't do file I/O, but there are two workarounds. One, I can force the browser to download a file from a remote location, and I can send data from the current page back up to a remote server via jQuery's $.get() or $.post() calls.