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'll have to go one step further than Rhino if you want to execute real live web pages, because the JavaScript on those pages will expect to be able to use objects that are native to a browser environment. A server-side JavaScript engine like Rhino won't have those objects.

John Resig (creator of jQuery) started a project called Env.js a couple of years ago; it might be what you're looking, for but I suspect you'll have a tough time getting consistent results from a wide variety of web pages. Here's his initial blog post about it:

http://ejohn.org/blog/bringing-the-browser-to-the-server/

Some similar projects are named in that post's comments.