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Comment by chrisohara | Hacker News Reader

This is in response to all the node/jsdom/jquery scraping posts that are popular lately. JSDom is hopeless for scraping - try parsing some slightly malformed HTML..

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Hey Chris, I was just trying to share a few things I'd learned. I know I haven't done as much scraping as others (like yourself and richcollins). Glad I've helped get some discussion going :)

Hey David, it wasn't a stab at your blog - your post was great - anything that builds some more interest in node.js is positive :) I just hate reading about people having trouble with JSDom and putting it down to the node platform. JSDom is an excellent parser, it just fails miserably when you feed it malformed HTML, and as we know, a majority of the internet falls in to this category. I needed a framework that could scrape anything on the web so I built it myself

just to be clear, jsdom is not a parser. By default it uses node-htmlparser which is not very lenient.

Have you tried using Aria's html5 parser? I hear it works better with malformed markup.

Currently I am using Selenium RC + jQuery for scraping. It is slow but it is the most reliable (due to using a real browser) solution you can get.

Anyway, will try your method soon.

Could you provide mode details on this, either in the comments here or in a blog post? I almost went with Selenium but ended up with a custom system to drive Firefox, would love to learn more about what the Selenium based solution looks like.

Just a few lines of code, no magic needed.

Example: https://github.com/tszming/Selenium-Google-Scrapper

You should consider creating a binding to libsgml. It's written in C and its permissive.

Interesting, thanks. I've been looking for a decent C lib to bind with node and play around with

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