Command line browser with js support

Question

Does anybody know good command line browser with js support?

Ideally I need following ability:

some-browser http://example.com > ~/page.html

It means that cli browser download html, execute js and output a page.

Solution 1

I'm not aware of an interactive browser with js support but you should have a look at PhantomJS which is defined as:

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

To get the page's content after it's been rendered:

$ phantomjs save_page.js http://example.com > ~/page.html

with save_page.js:

var system = require('system');
var page = require('webpage').create();

page.open(system.args[1], function()
{
    console.log(page.content);
    phantom.exit();
});

An interesting side-project is phantomjs-node which integrates PhantomJS with NodeJS, allowing the former to be used as a NodeJS module.

Solution 2

Edbrowse, an ed-style editor/browser optimized for blind users but appreciated by sysadmins for its scriptability, claims to support javascript based on Mozilla's engine. It's at http://the-brannons.com/edbrowse/.

Solution 3

If you are running linux, you can remote control Firefox using Ruby (and presumably other language bindings) with watir-webdriver, then after you have it working you can trick it into running without any display (but still hit the page, uploading downloading or scraping data) using Xvfb,

Solution 4

According to the documentation for elinks, it supports JavaScript. See section 2.6.1 for information on installing SpiderMonkey.

Solution 5

In case a PNG of the webpage is enough and you don't need the HTML source, you should be able to use webkit-image, a small command line utility that comes with Ubuntu. It's however not exactly a feature rich application, so it doesn't offer much customization, it might however be a good starting point for further hacking and thus maybe even allow getting the processed HTML output relatively easily.

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Comments

[LawrenceC]

I haven't really played with it but maybe uzbl (uzbl.org) could do it.

[unor]

See also: Text based webbrowser that supports JavaScript?

[Robert Johnstone]

Spot on. Just what I was looking for. I didn't need to ask my question in the end

[kokosing]

It depends on how you compile the links (or elinks)

[abalter]

I just tried this on a page I created myself. It is dumping the page before the javascript runs. Any suggestions?

[Julie Pelletier]

@abalter: That obviously means there is a syntax error in your page.