Scraping with node.js and jquery

Question

I'm trying to follow this tutorial on scraping with node and jquery -

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/how-to-scrape-web-pages-with-node-js-and-jquery/

Within that they have some code that reads like this -

request({uri:"http://events.sfgate.com/search?swhat=&swhen=&swhere=San+Francisco&commit=Search&st_select=any&search=true&svt=text&srss="},function(err,response,body){

jsdom.env({
html: "http://events.sfgate.com/search?swhat=&swhen=&swhere=San+Francisco&commit=Search&st_select=any&search=true&svt=text&srss=",
src:['http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.min.js'],
done: function(errors,window){
    console.log("WINDOW");
    console.log(window.jQuery);
    var $ = window.$;
    //other stuff

When I console log window.Jquery, or window.$, both are undefined - but shouldn't they be because jsdom should embed jquery into the page? Why is that not happening?

Answer 1

The problem is that you initialized it with "src" parameter which should contain the array of actual source code of the javascript files (jquery in this case) - not the url to the file.

If you want the url you need to initialize it like this:

jsdom.env(
  "http://nodejs.org/dist/",
  ["http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js"],
  function (errors, window) {

or like this:

jsdom.env({
  html: "http://news.ycombinator.com/",
  scripts: ["http://code.jquery.com/jquery.js"],
  done: function (errors, window) {

---

edit: There is another mistake in your code (if I'm not mistaken...) - you first download the page with the request module, but then instead of passing the html source to jsdom (by passing it the body you got from request ) you tell jsdom to download the page again. If you give jsdom the url of the page as html then you don't need to call the request module.