Make a click event in NodeJS - node.js

Question

I'm trying to make a click from server side.
I'm using nodeJS and I'm not able to use JQuery function.
I would make click on the .next class.
This is what I would do :
while (nbrPage > 0)
{
//my scraping code
nbrPage--;
$('.next').click();
}
Note than the html code to scrape is like this :
<span class="next">
<a id="nextPage-159c6fa8635" class="page" href="/blablabla"></a>
</span>
Does anyone know how to use JQuery methods in NodeJS code or how to make click function in NodeJS ?
EDIT: I'm scraping a website and I want to loop on each pagination and scrap my data from each page. For this I need to go on the next page and click on the html code below. In other words I would use JQuery functions like $('.next').click() in my node js code (using request and cheerio).
Note than I don't want to handle the click event, I'm looking to make the click.
Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Cheerio is a pretty useful tool which allows you to utilize jQuery within Node.JS. You can find more information over at - https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio
Request is designed to be the simplest way possible to make http
calls. It supports HTTPS and follows redirects by default.
Check out their documentation - https://github.com/request/request
For server-side, you need to create a function to find the a href with the id that started with "nextPage-". Then IF found you will need to get the value of the attribute href.
From there you would pass that value back to your "request" script, which I assume you already have and continue your scrapping till a "nextPage-" could not be located anymore.
That repetitive sequence of a function calling itself is called "recursion".
Now for what that might look like in code -
// Load Dependencies
const CHEERIO = require("cheerio");
const REQUEST = require("request");
/**
* Scraps HTML to find next page URL
*
* #function getNextPageUrl
*
* #param {string} HTML
*
* #returns {string || boolean} Returns URL or False
*/
function getNextPageUrl(HTML) {
// Load in scrapped html
let $ = CHEERIO.load(HTML);
// Find ID that starts with `nextPage-`
let nextPage = $("span[id^='nextPage-']:first");
// If it is 0, its false
if(nextPage.length) {
// Return href attribute value
return nextPage.attr("href");
} else {
// Nothing found, return false
return false;
}
}
/**
* Scraps the HTML from pages
*
* #function scrapper
*
* #param {string} URL
*
* #returns {string || boolean} Returns URL or False
*/
function scrapper(URL) {
// Check if URL was provided
if(!URL) {
return fasle;
}
// Send out request to URL
REQUEST(URL, function(error, response, body) {
// Check for errors
if(!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
console.log(body) // Show the HTML
// Recursion
let URL = getNextPageURL(body);
scrapper(URL);
} else {
return false;
}
});
}
// Pass to scrapper function test
//console.log(getNextPageURL("<span class='next'><a id='nextPage-159c6fa8635' class='page' href='/blablabla'></a></span>"));
// Start the initial scrapping
scrapper("http://google.com");

Answer 2

It's impossible to do it in Node.js. Node.js is server side, not client side.
As a solution, you can parse href at the link and make a request to scrap the next page. This is how the server-side scrappers usually work.