Web Scraping in a Google Chrome Extension (JavaScript + Chrome APIs)

Question

What are the best options for performing Web Scraping of a not currently open tab from within a Google Chrome Extension with JavaScript and whatever more te

Answer 1

Web scraping is kind of convoluted in a Chrome Extension. Some points:

• You run content scripts for access to the DOM.
• Background pages (one per browser) can send and receive messages to content scripts. That is, you can run a content script that sets up an RPC endpoint and fires a specified callback in the context of the background page as a response.
• You can execute content scripts in all frames of a webpage, then stitch the document tree (composed of the 1..N frames that the page contains) together.
• As S.K. suggested, your background page can send the data as an XMLHttpRequest to some kind of lightweight HTTP server that listens locally.