Parse the JavaScript returned from BeautifulSoup

Question

I would like to parse the webpage http://dcsd.nutrislice.com/menu/meadow-view/lunch/ to grab today's lunch menu. (I've built an Adafruit #IoT Thermal Printer and I'd like to automatically print the menu each day.)

I initially approached this using BeautifulSoup but it turns out that most of the data is loaded in JavaScript and I'm not sure BeautifulSoup can handle it. If you view source you'll see the relevant data stored in bootstrapData['menuMonthWeeks'].

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://dcsd.nutrislice.com/menu/meadow-view/lunch/"
soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(url).read())

This is an easy way to get the source and review.

My question is: what is the easiest way to extract this data so that I can do something with it? Literally, all I want is a string something like:

Southwest Cheese Omelet, Potato Wedges, The Harvest Bar (THB), THB - Cheesy Pesto Bread, Ham Deli Sandwich, Red Pepper Sticks, Strawberries

I've thought about using webkit to process the page and get the HTML (i.e. what a browser does) but that seems unnecessarily complex. I'd rather simply find something that can parse the bootstrapData['menuMonthWeeks'] data.

Answer 1

Something like PhantomJS may be more robust, but here's some basic Python code to extract it the full menu:

import json
import re
import urllib2

text = urllib2.urlopen('http://dcsd.nutrislice.com/menu/meadow-view/lunch/').read()
menu = json.loads(re.search(r"bootstrapData\['menuMonthWeeks'\]\s*=\s*(.*);", text).group(1))

print menu

After that, you'll want to search through the menu for the date you're interested in.

EDIT: Some overkill on my part:

import itertools
import json
import re
import urllib2

text = urllib2.urlopen('http://dcsd.nutrislice.com/menu/meadow-view/lunch/').read()
menus = json.loads(re.search(r"bootstrapData\['menuMonthWeeks'\]\s*=\s*(.*);", text).group(1))

days = itertools.chain.from_iterable(menu['days'] for menu in menus)

day = next(itertools.dropwhile(lambda day: day['date'] != '2014-01-13', days), None)

if day:
    print '\n'.join(item['food']['description'] for item in day['menu_items'])
else:
    print 'Day not found.'