login to a webpage using phantomjs and Jquery

javascript, jquery, phantomjs, web-scraping

Solution

I would recommend CasperJS highly for this.

CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS — the scriptable headless WebKit engine. It eases the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides useful high-level functions, methods & syntactic sugar for doing common tasks such as:

- defining & ordering browsing navigation steps

- filling & submitting forms

- clicking & following links

- capturing screenshots of a page (or part of it)

- testing remote DOM

- logging events

- downloading resources, including binary ones

- writing functional test suites, saving results as JUnit XML

- scraping Web contents

(from the CasperJS website)

I recently spent a day trying to get PhantomJS by itself to do things like fill out a log-in form and navigate to the next page.

CasperJS has a nice API purpose built for forms as well:

http://docs.casperjs.org/en/latest/modules/casper.html#fill

var casper = require('casper').create();

casper.start('http://some.tld/contact.form', function() {
    this.fill('form#contact-form', {
        'subject':    'I am watching you',
        'content':    'So be careful.',
        'civility':   'Mr',
        'name':       'Chuck Norris',
        'email':      'chuck@norris.com',
        'cc':         true,
        'attachment': '/Users/chuck/roundhousekick.doc'
    }, true);
});

casper.then(function() {
    this.evaluateOrDie(function() {
        return /message sent/.test(document.body.innerText);
    }, 'sending message failed');
});

casper.run(function() {
    this.echo('message sent').exit();
});

Problem

I am new to phantomjs, Java script and WebScraping in General. What I want to do is basic http authentication and then visit another URL to get some information. Here is what I have till now. Please tell me what I am doing wrong. ``` var page = require('webpage').create(); var system = require('system'); page.onConsoleMessage = function(msg) { console.log(msg); }; page.onAlert = function(msg) { console.log('alert!!>' + msg); }; page.settings.userName = "foo"; page.settings.password = "bar"; page.open("http://localhost/login", function(status) { console.log(status); var retval = page.evaluate(function() { return "test"; }); console.log(retval); page.open("http://localhost/ticket/" + system.args[1], function(status) { if ( status === "success" ) { page.injectJs("jquery.min.js"); var k = page.evaluate(function () { var a = $("div.description > h3 + p"); if (a.length == 2) { console.log(a.slice(-1).text()) } else { console.log(a.slice(-2).text()) } //return document.getElementById('addfiles'); }); } }); phantom.exit(); }); ``` I am passing an argument to this file: a ticket number which gets appended to the 2nd URL.

Original source

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