Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from February, 2020

Scraping Hidden Data

I'm genuinely excited to write this particular entry, for two reasons.  One is that its been some time since I've jumped back in to NodeJS, but the other because is because it is my first attempt at writing something using Puppeteer .  I needed to scrape information about products on a particular website, and through my exploration, on each iteration of the page parameter in the query string, in the Chrome Developer Tools , there was an API request for the granular information that I needed for the products. It was extremely difficult to work out just how this URL was being constructed in order to know what to request for, but I quickly came to a conclusion that if there was information in the developer tools, then that could be somehow extracted - and remembered this little tool existed - so I hopped to work! So the premise came across as being rather simple - intercept the browser making the requests that you find in the network tab .  There was one path that I knew how i