Re: Two questions about grabbing "webpages" with p:load / p:document

There are tools, like Selenium, that let you drive a headless web browser. It seems plausible that one could create a step that loaded a page in a headless web browser, “waited a bit” and then grabbed the content of the page.

If “waited a bit” means a delay, then you get whatever has happened automatically on the page. But “waited a bit” could also, conceivable, mean “find the button labeled ‘load it up’ and push it, then wait for the div with the class ‘results’ to be non-empty.”

If you literally wanted to drive Selenium, it seems like the first problem is inventing a language for describing the interaction. It’s not trivial because it needs to support things like “find the text box labeled ‘input’, type ‘spoon’, find the button labeled submit, press it, find the div labeled results, loop until it’s not empty with a 1 second wait on each iteration…etc”.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/

> Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to
> solve other problems.--Rene Descartes

Received on Friday, 24 January 2025 09:55:01 UTC