I am looking to return an embedded response from a website. This website makes it very difficult to reach this embedded response without javascript so I am hoping to use splash. I am not interested in returning the rendered HTML, but rather one embedded response. Below is a screenshot of the exact response that I am looking to get back from splash.
This response returns a JSON object to the site to render, I would like the raw JSON returned from this response, how do I do this in Lua?
Turns out this is a bit tricky. The following is the kludge I have found to do this:
Splash call with LUA script, called from Scrapy:
scrpitBusinessUnits = """
function main(splash, args)
splash.request_body_enabled = true
splash.response_body_enabled = true
assert(splash:go(args.url))
assert(splash:wait(18))
splash:runjs('document.getElementById("RESP_INQA_WK_BUSINESS_UNIT$prompt").click();')
assert(splash:wait(20))
return {
har = splash:har(),
}
end
"""
yield SplashRequest(
url=self.start_urls[0],
callback=self.parse,
endpoint='execute',
magic_response=True,
meta={'handle_httpstatus_all': True},
args={'lua_source': scrpitBusinessUnits,'timeout':90,'images':0},
)
This script works by returning the HAR file of the whole page load, it is key to set splash.request_body_enabled = true
and splash.response_body_enabled = true
to get the actual response content in the HAR file.
The HAR file is just a glorified JSON object with a different name... so:
def parse(self, response):
harData = json.loads(response.text)
responseData = harData['har']['log']['entries']
...
# Splash appears to base64 encode large content fields,
# you may have to decode the field to load it properly
bisData = base64.b64decode(bisData['content']['text'])
From there you can search the JSON object for the exact embedded response.
I really dont think this is a very efficient method, but it works.