Dumping browser document content using Zombie.js

Question

Using browser.visit, I am fetching the page of a browser as shown in the documentation. According to the browser API, browser.document returns the main window's document. However, I am not sure how to dump (display) the contents of the document. Is there a method like browser.document.toString() or browser.document.text() to be able to print the contents of the document in the console.

Thanks, Sony

Irritated

did you try browser.html()? – Mature

Yes, I did. But, it prints the entire html contents, right? I thought browser encompasses all details of the page such as state, content etc. whereas the document is a subset which just stores the dom structure. Am I wrong? I am trying to print just the dom structure using browser.document as against the entire html. – Irritated

Answer 1

What you want is probably:

browser.document.innerHTML 

Alsatia

BTW, this doesn't seem to work on the current version of Zombie.js, but browser.document.documentElement.innerHTML does ;) – Doubleminded

undefinedundefinedundefinedundefined – Chitwood

hence the probably keyword :) – Alsatia

Answer 2

There is a browser.text(selector, context?). Selector is a CSS selector evaluated against the document body. Context is a optional second argument, the CSS selector is evaluated against the element given as the context.

You can say something like browser.text('body') to get the text in the body.

Aeroballistics

browser.text('document') does not work. I thought document is a selector of browser. I am trying to access the "dom strucuture" via browser.document. - Sony – Irritated

@Irritated browser.text('body') will select whatever text is in the body tag of a html page/document. I haven't tried it but you should be able to do browser.text('html') to select the text in the headers + body. – Howlyn

Answer 3

I got here while looking for answer for the same question. I may be late for the party, but try using

Browser.visit(url, function(error, browser){
    fs.appendFileSync('index.html', browser.html());
})

Remember to put error checking here and do better handling, but should give you basic HTML document.

Bixby

Answer 4

If it's not necessarily HTML (like you find yourself pulling XML or JSON through Zombie due to complicated, valid reasons...), you can access it like this:

browser.document._childNodes[0]._nodeValue

Nightie