Scraping a page with node.js? - node.js

Question

I want to get the flights table for every city from a page but befor that i have to set search fields and hit the button and befor that i have to import captcha at the first page. The web site designed with .Net. I import the captcha by my self but i want to do the rest with nodejs.
This is what i'm doing. first, import the captcha and then from loaded page and by looking at the firebug, set request header and request url and then send using http.request with GET method to scrape the page with nodejs again. after that i get viewstate of the page and again usign firebug, set another request header and "post data" and request url and send them using http.request to scrape the final page. This information that i set using firebug, are fixed; i mean, urls, header options and post data. what i have to change is city name in post data.
But i get a page with empty table. if is possible, What should i do? (sorry for my bad english :) )
This is the url (in persian): http://sepehr.iranhrc.ir.
Thanks in advance.
var http = require('follow-redirects').http;
var querystring = require('querystring');
var cheerio = require('cheerio');
var dataToAttach = {
'ScriptManager1': 'uplFlightSearch|btnSubmit37756070715319',
'__ASYNCPOST': true,
'__EVENTARGUMENT': '',
'__EVENTTARGET': '',
'__LASTFOCUS': '',
'__VIEWSTATE': '',
'__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR': 'E4CF65F9',
'btnSubmit37756070715319': '?????',
'dplFrom': 'THR',
'dplReservationRouteType': 'RoundTrip_FixedDate',
'dplTo': '0',
'dplFlightAdults': '1',
'dplFlightChilds': '0',
'dplFlightInfants': '0',
'txtCountUp': '00:26',
'txtDepartureDate': '1394/04/02',
'txtReturningDate': '1394/04/04'
};
var flightsSearchPageROs = {
hostname: 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir',
path: '/Systems/FA/Reservation/Flight_NewReservation_Search.aspx?qry=sbV7wBdq4B7yEk1yv0OpvmofQkdkbWH49Wjk6UIMGiw95zDjDGo0/ssWJH8Wjv1D',
method: 'GET',
headers:{
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
'Connection': 'keep-alive',
'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
'Cookie': 'ASP.NET_SessionId=2iexj4pfxld4mdilfwttka2q;',
'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=utf-8',
'Host': 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir',
'Referer': 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir'
}
};
var resultsPageROs = {
hostname: 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir',
path: '/Systems/FA/Reservation/Flight_NewReservation_Search.aspx?action=display&rnd=2378726045210585',
method: 'POST',
headers:{
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
'Connection': 'keep-alive',
'Cookie': 'ASP.NET_SessionId=o1ipad335qahuaahc25ngalr;',
'Content-Length': '',
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8',
'Referer': 'http://sepehr.iranhrc.ir/Systems/FA/Reservation/Flight_NewReservation_Search.aspx',
'Host': 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir',
'Pragma': 'no-cache',
'X-MicrosoftAjax': 'Delta=true',
'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest'
}
};
var flightsSearchPage = http.request(flightsSearchPageROs, function(response{
var dataStream = '';
var htmlCode = '';
var date = '';
response.on('data', function(chunk){
dataStream += chunk;
});
response.on('end', function(){
htmlCode = cheerio.load(dataStream);
secondDataToAttach.__VIEWSTATE = htmlCode("__VIEWSTATE").val();
resultsPageROs.headers['Content-Length'] = querystring.stringify(dataToAttach).length;
resultsPageRequest();
});
});
flightsSearchPage.on('error', function(e){console.log("Error0: " + e.message);});
flightsSearchPage.end();
function resultsPageRequest(){
var changingCitiesBoxResponse = http.request(resultsPageROs, function(response){
response.setEncoding('utf8');
var dataStream = '';
var htmlCode = '';
response.on('data', function(chunk){
dataStream += chunk;
});
response.on('end', function(){
htmlCode = cheerio.load(dataStream);
console.log(htmlCode.html());
});
console.log('STATUS: ' + response.statusCode);
});
changingCitiesBoxResponse.on('error', function(e){console.log("Error1: " + e.message);});
changingCitiesBoxResponse.end(querystring.stringify(dataToAttach));
}
EDIT
One thing that i forgot to mention it was that, this is done in PHP with Curl and i looked at the code in curl part and done exactly like that with node and http.request. PHP returns correct answer but mine not.
And I used phantom as well.This is the code:
var url = "http://sepehr.iranhrc.ir/Systems/FA/Reservation/Flight_NewReservation_Search.aspx?action=display&rnd=4565721642440773";
var settings = {
operation: "POST",
encoding: "utf8",
weak: false,
headers: {
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
'Connection': 'keep-alive',
'Cookie': 'ASP.NET_SessionId=2iexj4pfxld4mdilfwttka2q;',
'Content-Length': '',
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8',
'Referer': 'http://sepehr.iranhrc.ir/Systems/FA/Reservation/Flight_NewReservation_Search.aspx?qry=sbV7wBdq4B7yEk1yv0OpvmofQkdkbWH49Wjk6UIMGiw95zDjDGo0/ssWJH8Wjv1D',
'Host': 'sepehr.iranhrc.ir',
'Pragma': 'no-cache',
'X-MicrosoftAjax': 'Delta=true',
'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest'
},
data: querystring.stringify(secondDataToAttach)
};
phantom.create(function (ph){
ph.createPage(function (page){
page.open(url2, settings, function(status){
console.log(status);
page.evaluate(function(){ return document.body.innerHTML; }, function(result){
console.log('Content ' + result);
ph.exit();
});
});
});
}, {dnodeOpts: {weak: false}
});
But i didn't get the answer.
And yes, it uses AJAX to send the request. According to Firebug:
The first request is sending a post data and the second one, i think is a redirect that gives the link to the result page(i used that link but no luck) and the third is the result page with the flight details that i can't get.
May be i used them wrong. How can i use these Three request to get flights table?

Answer 1

I think what's happening is that the page you want the results from is loading them through a separate AJAX request, and a regular get request isn't going to get that. You'll need to either figure out what that separate request is and do it yourself, or scrape the page with something like PhantomJS that can execute the javascript for the page.
First though, go to the page on your browser regularly and watch the network tab and locate that request that loads in the data.