Getting source of a page after it's rendered in a templating engine?

Question

So I'm doing some screen scraping on a site that is very JS heavy. It uses a client side templating engine that renders all the content. I tried using jQuery and that worked in the console, but not on the server (Nodejs), obviously.

I looked at a few libraries for Python and Java, and they seem to be able to handle what I want, but I would prefer a JS solution that works with a Node server.

Is there any way to get the complete source of a page after it's rendered, using Node?

Answer 1

I used jsdom for screen scrapping and the code goes here...

var jsdom = require( 'jsdom' );
jsdom.env( {
url: <give_url_of_page_u_want_to_scarpe>,
scripts: [ "http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js" ],
done: function( error, window ) {
  var $ = window.$;

  // required page is loaded in $....
  //you can write any javascript or jquery code get what ever you want

}
} );

Answer 2

I personally love PhantomJS or Selenium, which do exactly that.

The docs/examples should work pretty much out of the box.

Answer 3

if you want to use a nodejs module then you might be interested in this:

https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node

or this:

https://github.com/alexscheelmeyer/node-phantom