Running jQuery on a static HTML file from Bash

Question

I'm trying to write a simple script to simply check a webpage for a specific value:

$("a#infgHeader").text() == "Delivered";

I'd like to automate this from a Bash script to be run at an interval. I'm also fine with using Python. I need to essentially make an HTTP request, get the response, and have a way to intelligently query the result. Is there a library which will help me with the querying part?

Answer 1

Xpath is great for querying html.

Something like this:

//a[@id='infgHeader']/@text

In chrome developer tool you can use the search box in the Elements tab to test the expression.

Quick run in terminal:

$echo '<div id="test" text="foo">Hello</div>' | xpath '//div[@id="test"]/@text' 
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --
 text="foo"