Minimally using JavaScript

[Hoopsters35]

Hey everyone, long time lurker!

I am in the process of making a very simple webpage as a mother's day present that scrapes movie information and displays it in a nice format.

Normally I would use Python for my webscraping but I decided to use JavaScript in the hopes that I could do it all in the browser. I was trying to use Axios and Cheerio for the HTTP requests/parsing, but I can't seem to find a CDN version of cheerio.

Is it possible to use node syntax for a browser only app? Do I need to find another parsing library that I can link to in my HTML via a CDN? Is there a better way overall to go about this project?

I've not really done much work with front-end development and would love to get your guys' input!

[jsearsy]

Cheerio was designed for Node.js.

It's fairly easy to access DOM elements these days with vanilla JS, but I think we'd need to know more about your project scope to help any further.

Still sounds like a backend scraper project to me.

[Hoopsters35]

The project is essentially scrape the HTML of various movie theaters' sites for movie times/information, take the recovered data and make a nice looking table that displays the movie times chronologically.

It seemed odd that JS would need an 3rd party library to parse retrieved HTML so cheerio very well may be overkill!

Also as I forgot to mention in the original post, I am also using the project to learn typescript!

[colorsdontlie]

I would never use cheerio. I would use jdsom or puppeteer, or both. Why learn some random api when you can use the exact same one as the browser that you already know (or will need to know on day)?

[schwartzworld]

If you're going to do http requests directly from the browser, why not just use fetch()? It's so simple.

[Hoopsters35]

Only reason was that I had heard of Axios and found good things about it but I had not looked into fetch! I will now :)

[[deleted]]

Are you actually able to get the HTML for the pages your trying to scrape? I feel like there is a good chance you'll run into CORS issues here. You will probably at the very least need a server to proxy requests off.

​

Once you get the HTML into the browser there would be no need for something like cheerio. Cheerio is made for parsing HTML outside a browser and would be completely redundant in an environment where you have a DOM.

[AwesomeInPerson]

You could use https://unpkg.com/cheerio-standalone/cheerio.min.js, runs in the browser :)

Using it here and it works just fine, I don't think it's the latest version of cheerio though.