Can PhantomJS be used an an alternative to BeautifulSoup?
I am trying to search on Etsy and visit all the links in term. In Python, I know how to do this (with BeautifulSoup) but today I want to see if I can do the same with PhantomJS. I'm not getting very far.
This script should search "hello kitty" on Etsy and return all the of products
<a class="listing-thumb" href=...></a>
and print them in the console. Ideally I'd visit them later on and get the information I need. Right now it just freezes. Any ideas?
var page = require('webpage').create();
var url = 'http://www.etsy.com/search?q=hello%20kitty';
page.open(url, function(status){
// list all the a.href links in the hello kitty etsy page
var link = page.evaluate(function() {
return document.querySelectorAll('a.listing-thumb');
});
for(var i = 0; i < link.length; i++){ console.log(link[i].href); }
phantom.exit();
});
I have toyed with using CasperJS, which may be better designed for this.
PhantomJS evaluate()
cannot serialize and return complex objects like HTMLElements or NodeLists, so you have to map them to serializable things before:
var page = require('webpage').create();
var url = 'http://www.etsy.com/search?q=hello%20kitty';
page.open(url, function(status) {
// list all the a.href links in the hello kitty etsy page
var links = page.evaluate(function() {
return [].map.call(document.querySelectorAll('a.listing-thumb'), function(link) {
return link.getAttribute('href');
});
});
console.log(links.join('\n'));
phantom.exit();
});
Note: here we use [].map.call()
in order to treat a NodeList
as a standard Array
.
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