Non-browser emulation of JavaScript - is it possible?

Question

I have a new project I am working on that involves fetching a webpage, (using PHP and cURL) parsing the HTML and javascript out of it and then handling the data in the resul

Answer 1

You will need:

• one JavaScript interpreter
• one DOM Level 2 Core and HTML implementation
• 500g of non-standard but commonly-used DOM extensions
• a pinch of DOM Level 2 Style (which might mean also a CSS interpreter and layout engine)
• yoghurt pots, round-ended scissors and sticky-back plastic

Once you have assembled your components (remember to get a grown-up to help you with the sandboxing), you'll find what you have is essentially indistinguishable from a web browser.

JAVA is not part of the shell build on the server. V8/SquirrelFish is C++ code I would need to convert to PHP.

Porting a JS engine to PHP would be a huge task, and the resulting performance likely horrible. You can't even really get away with a nearly-solution on JavaScript any more, since so many pages are using hideously complex libraries like jQuery to do everything, which will require in-depth JS support.

I don't think you're going to be able to do this purely in PHP. You'll have to hook up Java/Rhino/HTMLUnit or a proper web browser like Mozilla. If your hosting environment doesn't give you the flexibility you need to compile and deploy that sort of thing, you'd have to move to a better hosting setup with a shell (preferably VPS).

If you can avoid this unpleasantness some other way, by special-casing known pages' AJAX access, do that.