Running jQuery on a static HTML file from Bash

Question

I'm trying to write a simple script to simply check a webpage for a specific value:

$("a#infgHeader").text() == "Delivered";

I'd like to automate this from a Bash script to be run at an interval. I'm also fine with using Python. I need to essentially make an HTTP request, get the response, and have a way to intelligently query the result. Is there a library which will help me with the querying part?

ebaxt · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-29T18:53:48.850

11

Xpath is great for querying html.

Something like this:

//a[@id='infgHeader']/@text

In chrome developer tool you can use the search box in the Elements tab to test the expression.

Quick run in terminal:

$echo '<div id="test" text="foo">Hello</div>' | xpath '//div[@id="test"]/@text' 
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --
 text="foo"

edited Feb 29 '12 at 18:53

answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:15

ebaxt

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Hooray for xPath! I was wondering if it would be of help here. I didn't know because HTML != XML, but hey, if it works, it works. – Naftuli Kay Feb 29 '12 at 19:33
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`xpath` works poorly with not-strictly-XML HTML code. When running it on a 100-line HTML snippet, it freezes for a minute then dies with a "mismatched tag" error, apparently because the code had `` and not ``. – Tgr Mar 23 '16 at 14:48
Yes, xpath is not reliable. Guess I'll use [regular expressions to parse HTML](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454) then. – phil294 Mar 17 '18 at 10:31

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:18

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http://pypi.python.org/pypi/spynner/1.10

Spynner will let you select elements from the dom using jquery syntax.

Or there are other libraries that let you parse HTML. BeautifulSoup, lxml

answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:18

dm03514

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:21

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Alex MacCaw wrote up a nice post that does just what you're asking using node.js / JavaScript. There are a LOT of capabilities it brings too.

http://alexmaccaw.com/posts/node_jquery_xml_parsing

answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:21

Joshua

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:18

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I have recently done something like this using nodejs + jsdom both are well documented with a low entry barrier.

answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:18

OlduwanSteve

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 29 '12 at 18:21

To parse html is not trivial for general websites, because html may not be prefect and DOM can be modified by java-script on the fly, so parsing html may not make sense in such case.

Best way is to use a browser and directly access the DOM, for that you can use a headless browser like phontomjs, so you can script it and check whatever you need to check

Running jQuery on a static HTML file from Bash

5 Answers5