I'm a member in a website and there's a huge (automatically generated) HTML table on this PHP page that is only available to me and I wanted the table source code because I want to copy it to a HTML page on my computer to then process it with a program.
The problem is that when I right-click to display the page source code it works. However, I'm tired of looking at the source code and inside all the linked JavaScript files. I can't seem to find the table or any data of it on the scripts/page source codes.
I can select the table data and copy it, but it is just the data. It doesn't say anything about flash, so I'm assuming it's not flash. The data of the scripts/pages isn't obfuscated, it's easily human-readable.
I used Google Chrome's 'inspect element' and it worked.
I was thinking on doing a PHP script that would import data from a similar table, but I will have to know more about a lot of stuff mentioned here.
What can I be doing wrong or what can cause this kind of behavior?
Two possible reasons could be that the table may be returned from an AJAX call to another page that returns the HTML for the table, or they could be generating the table's html code and contents on the fly from a list of values coming from javascript or some other source rather than serving the HTML output to you from the server side.
Something you can do to figure it out is see if there are any empty div or other html elements where the table appears to be inserted, and search their javascript files for references to those elements. That may shed some light on how they populate it.
Feel free to update your question with the raw html (where you don't see the table) and maybe some javascript and we can look. Use pastebin if it is a lot of content.
Would it help to use the Firefox plugin called Firebug?
Using this plugin you can click on an area of a page to see the code displayed in the Firebug section at the bottom of your window.
Here are the details: https://getfirebug.com/whatisfirebug
Maybe the table is generated with a JS script, if that's the case, doing right click and "View source" would not show you the html. You need to use something like Chrome's devtools. Open google chrome and visit that page, once there, right click the table and select "Inspect element", the devtools will open and then you'll see the table's code, right click it's opening tag and select "Copy as html".
Let me know if that works :)
Try a developer extension like http://getfirebug.com/ The underlying source code may not reflect output due to how much the DOM can be modified by javascript with extensive use of ajax. This plugin will permit you to view elements as they're interacting with the browser.
its probably that the table is dynamically generated on the fly so looking at the source code won't actually give you much. try looking at the "GENERATED" source code or inspecting the DOM using Firebug, or the Developer tools of chrome/safari.
Or better yet, try your hand at web scraping:
http://vancouverdata.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-web-scraping-xpath-html-google.html
Although I'm not sure if it'll work for pages that need a login. But hey, at least you learned something new :p
Related
Trying to troubleshoot some design issues on a website (built with OpenCart), and ran into an issue I've never seen before: an element shows up in Dev Tools but DOESN'T show up in View Source.
How is this possible? And how can I find the actual element?
The situation is, I had to modify the original template (category.twig) to change the "Add To Cart" button to "View"... and it works in the default category view, but as soon as any of the filters are selected, this happens... it reverts to the original view.. but it's still the same file (I added the path into the code itself, just to make sure I'm indeed looking at the same file, you can see in in the Code View portion of the screenshot).
So yeah... trying to trace where this "Add To Cart" is coming from, and being mighty confused as so why it's NOT showing up in View Source. And no, there's no JavaScript targeting the "view_button" DIV and transforming it into "Add To Cart" - I made the "view_button" DIV, it's custom.
Any advice?
Javascript can (and often does) create new elements in the document, that won´t appear on code view becasuse it does not execute javascript. I would advice you to download the entire page and then search for button-cart-text in js files or the whole document.
The document's source does not define the element statically, but the JavaScript creates the element dynamically. This is very common. The dev. tools show you the document as it exists in memory (it's current state), which will include anything that the JS caused to happen, but view...source shows you the actual source code of the static file that was initially loaded.
Source code is what the programmer wrote. Or, in the case of "View Source" in a browser, it is at least what the server responded with, which may have been written by hand or may be generated using various forms of compilation or bundling. A common example here would be a page rendered from templates (e.g. using Handlebars).
Live code, or at least live markup, is what you are seeing in the Elements pane in the browser console. You are seeing the DOM rendered in realtime, right before your very eyes. You are watching the program (i.e. the page and its subresources) execute and take effect. It is mutating, most likely due to JavaScript.
For extremely simple pages like example.com, the difference between the source code and the live code may be imperceptible, because nothing is modified at runtime. However, for more complex, real-world websites, the DOM is often modified while you are browsing the page so that it can respond to your clicks, your typing, or anything else. These modifications are extremely powerful and useful. However, as you have discovered, they make the source code and the live code diverge. This makes a programmer's life more difficult, while making a user's life easier.
When you select some elements on the webpage by mouse and then paste it in new email (for example in gmail) you still see html elements. But when I add html code to clipboard from js I still see html code after pasting. Is there any way to add some html code from js and see generated elements after pasting?
That is not possible because of the way gmail handles this (the right way). Just imagine if you were able to send javascript tags to anyone with codes that would send cookie info back to you. This is called escaping html and google (and everyone else who does it does it right). Cheers
What I Want: Very simply I have a C program that generates a variable periodically, I want to be able to display this value on a website.
Restrictions: The webpage is HTML, php does not work, javascript does [I have tried a few javascript solutions but they have all been long, tedious and in the end ineffective] I want it to be able to format the text so that it matches the rest of the webpage. Above all I'd really like to find something simple that works.
Freedoms: I can output the variable from my C program to just about any file type and content that I want, the file is hosted so is available locally to the server or online for the client.
Preferred Solutions: I am currently playing around with the object and iframe tags native to html. They give a nice simple input:
<object height=20 width=75 type='text/plain' border=0 data="URL/filename.txt"></object>
inserts the contents of my file, but it can't be formatted so I am stuck with 12pt Courier font which is not acceptable. Using
<iframe seamless height=20 width=75 scrolling='no' src="URL/filename.htm"></iframe>
and adding my desired font/colour/size etc to the htm file gets me the right text style, but htm has a large amount of white padding around it which I can't seem to get rid of so I have to make my iframe quite large for the text to be displayed, but then it doesn't fit smoothly with other text.
So anyone that can answer one of four questions:
How to remove excess padding from htm
How to format the style of a html object
Is there anything in Java as simple as the php [so apparently it doesn't show php code even when you quote it as code. But basically using echo and get_file_contents to insert the contents of a txt file into a html page]
Propose an alternate solution
Padding and style can be handled by css.
By java I assume you mean javascript - google-ing will help you. Without details of what your server is running and what is dispatching your pages we can't give you an exact answer. You might want something with ajax to keep it updating in the background.
Try googling your question, you'd be surprised how often this helps.
I'm not sure what you're trying to do once you get the variable into your web page, but I think something like the following could be useful.
Create a hidden div on your page
Have your C application write the variable to some file
Use jquery to execute an ajax call to pull that value into the div ( or whatever other container you want to use
using some type of timer, execute the ajax call every X period of time, which will then get your up to date variable
on your main page, have another timer that will then come in to that container, grab your value and then you are free to do what you want with it.
This is all off the top of my head without knowing much about what you're trying to accomplish. If you provide some further details we may be able to help you a little more.
You need AJAX... that's just a fancy buzz-word. It means you can tell JavaScript can get a file from the server without reloading the page and you can insert data from that file into your HTML.
AJAX is made much simpler by using a JavaScript library like jQuery, but it can be done without jQuery. There's a pretty decent Getting Started tutorial at Mozilla Developer Network if you want to do it the hard way, but I really recommend jQuery.
As far as formatting... any formatting... you need to use CSS. Just about everything about the appearance of anything on a web page is controlled by CSS. MDN has a Learn CSS section, too.
load jquery on you main html file
put a div with some id (example id="newvalue")
make you c program to write the output in a file (for example value.html)
on main html page header, after jquery include code add some javascript like
$( document ).ready(function() {
$("#newvalue").load('yoursiteurl/value.html');
});
Why do I get a blank tab content area on Magento's Category edit form?
Background
In Magento, I've added an input_renderer to a custom category attribute that produces a drop-down menu (select). The job of the renderer is to append a bit of JavaScript that listens for change events on a "parent" drop-down, and populate itself with options based on the value of that parent drop-down. Here's what I have:
This works fine in my development environment. But on staging, as soon as the General tab content is fetched (which includes my JS code), the content area collapses and goes blank:
No JS errors thrown in the console
No Warnings/Errors thrown in server logs
This only started happening after adding my JS code
I posted a related question last week because I was frustrated that I couldn't find a problem with my JavaScript code. So now I'm coming at it from a different angle.
Others have reported a "white screen" issue, but no solutions given have worked for me.
Any pointers? If you are curious to see my source code, here's the input renderer:
https://gist.github.com/vbuck/5310724
Looks like you're doing some funky stuff with your ajax url. My suggestion is to debug it before moving on.
Can you see the call in your network tab?
Console.log the final url and try it in a new window.
You are inserting params in the url after it has been generated... Does that really work?
It's an admin module, why aren't you using:
Mage::helper("adminhtml")->getUrl()
On a side note,
<code>
script language="text/javascript"
</code>
is considered bad practice and you should use
<code>
script type="text/javascript"
</code>.
It's probably not the source of your problem though.
Hope you got some good pointers.
Just for the record, it was an issue with a bad variable assignment. I moved the JS into its own file, loaded via a layout update, then initialized it from the block (in getAfterElementHtml). It was here that I discovered one of my variables was not being assigned because of a syntax error in a block method.
I have a page where there's a drag and drop table where the order of the rows determines the value of a subtotal. However, it's more complicated than just addition and I would rather not duplicate the logic in JavaScript to update the values.
A simple solution would be to reload the whole page using Ajax and then replace the table from the page fetched via Ajax. Perhaps it's not the most elegant solution but I thought it'd be a quick way to get the job done that would be acceptable for now.
You can do that with jQuery like this:
$('#element-around-table').load(document.location.href + ' #table-id');
However, my "simple" solution turned out to not be so simple because the table also contains a <form> tag which is not being displayed in Firefox (Safari works).
When I inspect the page using Firebug, I see the form, but it and its elements grayed out.
Searching on the web, I found a rather confused post by a guy who says FF3 and IE strip <form> tags from innerHTML calls.
I'm probably going to move on to do this some other way, but for my future reference, I'd like to know: is this the case?
That post is rather confused, I just tested your code and it worked fine. The form tag was shown in firefox 3.0.8 just fine.
Looking at you code example, though I wonder if you just gave an incomplete example... make sure that the page you call returns only the html that goes inside that wrapper element.
I've run into this type of thing before. FORM tags need to be added to the DOM. If they're added using a method that writes to innerHTML, the tag will appear, but it won't be there as far as JavaScript is concerned.