[egb]

Anybody know of any tools that would work with JS-rendered sites, and not have to "parse the JS"?

[egb]

Answering my own question:

CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript for the PhantomJS WebKit headless browser and SlimerJS (Gecko). It eases the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides useful high-level functions, methods & syntactic sugar for doing common tasks such as:

    defining & ordering browsing navigation steps
    filling & submitting forms
    clicking & following links
    capturing screenshots of a page (or part of it)
    testing remote DOM
    logging events
    downloading resources, including binary ones
    writing functional test suites, saving results as JUnit XML
    scraping Web contents

[mopoke]

I wrote a blog post on my experiences using CasperJS to parse a single page site which used angular. http://www.andykelk.net/tech/web-scraping-with-casperjs

[CMCDragonkai]

I recently created a service designed to make JS sites crawlable by search engines and other robots. However it works for scraping as well. Try the demo: https://snapsearch.io/

[checker659]

PhantomJS?

[e1g]

>Is it also a webscraper that can pull data out of a page for me?

No, Phantom will only recreate the page as it would look like to a human user (i.e. after all javascript is parsed and executed). It will not help you parse or slice the page - you would have to do that part programatically with other dom-parsing tools.

[checker659]

Sorry. I guess you're right. As a programmer, both of those look the same to me.

[egb]

"PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API", so it's a browser.

Is it also a webscraper that can pull data out of a page for me?

[nols]

I've heard of people using PhantomJS with CasperJS to scrape, not sure if it can be done solely with PhantomJS.

[vaviloff]

CasperJS is a higher-level wrapper for PhantomJS, so - yes, it could be done with PhantomJS solely... But you wouldn't want to, because CasperJS makes automation easier.

[uptown]

Are there any libraries to facilitate database-connectivity to SQL Server or MySQL from javascript? I've used CasperJS to scrape some sites, but always fall back on post-processing the scraped data with another program in order to get it into my database. I'd love to be able to do it all from one piece of code.

[gee_totes]

You could always have your CasperJS scraping script make an AJAX request to a RESTful API for your MySQL DB. You won't be doing it all from one piece of code, but you'll be doing about 90% of it.

[lost_my_pwd]

SlimerJS too