Nodejs scraping website after javascript has loaded the values

Question

Probably a newbie question on nodejs/jsdom

I am trying to scrape a website using node.js. I am using jsdom and jquery to get the html and parse the required things. But, somehow the values i am getting are not the ones shown on the website. Basically the values are dynamically changed by javascript and i want those values. The whole reason i was using nodejs/jsdom for scraping was that js would be executed and I get the values after that event.

Is there some way to tell jsdom to wait until the javascript executes? or have i got this all wrong? I have googled a lot on this matter.

Answer 1

You would be better of using something like casperjs http://casperjs.org/. It is a testing utility based on phantomjs. It is basically exactly like opening the page in a webkit browser, just without the GUI. You could write something like. I dont think it works with node, but it should be easy enough to run a casper script and pipe the output back to node.:

var casper = require('casper').create({
    loadImages: true,
    loadPlugins: true,
    verbose: true,
    //logLevel: 'info',
    clientScripts: [
        'jquery-1.7.1.min.js',
    ],
    viewportSize: {
        width: 1366,
        height: 768,
    },
    pageSettings: {
        javascriptEnabled: true,
        userAgent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.9 Safari/536.5',
    },
});

casper.start(url);

casper.thenEvaluate(function () {
    //javascript code to run in the scope of the page
});