Web scraping in Javascript

[haghadi]

I am new to javascript and want to learn about webscraping. I’ve looked at some tutorials but I am still very confused. For instance, I want to make a javascript app that takes input a book ISBN number and feeds it to http://www.lookupbyisbn.com/ and gets the results from it and shows it to me.


Can someone show me how to do it??

[rnd me]

you have to use node.js or something else that can fetch urls from anywhere.
i would recommend using an html5 DOM parser so that your code is standardized between systems (html5 parsers are all the same).

the 2nd easiest way is using php and xpath.

[Old Pedant]

What Rnd_Me neglected to say: JavaScript can not *directly* read content from another site.

So you need a simple server-side proxy (as he stated) to go read the content and then serve it up to your JavaScript code so that, from the browser's perspective, you are reading content from your own site. You can create a server-side proxy very simply in most any server-side system: PHP, ASP. JSP, ASP.NET, or even Node.js.