php - Scrape web site generated by Javascript

Question

I think this is a real challenging one!

I write a website for my local football league, www.rdyfl.co.uk , and include javascript code snippets from the F.A's Full-Time system where we generate our fixtures, linking in tables fixtures recent results etc.

For another feature I want to add to the site I need to scrape the 'Upcoming Fixtures' for each agegroup and division but when I examine the source I have two problems.

1. The fixtures content is generated by javascript and therefore I need to see the generated source and not just the source.

2. When I view the generated source using Firefox the team names are actually further javascript links and not the name itself.

I basically want to somehow download the fixtures on a regular basis and write then to a mysql database ?

I have asked the F.A. and they have no more options available to access the data ?

Having never coded for scraping before can anyone point me to a simple solution or does anyone fancy the challange?

Answer 1

This question was asked a long time ago, but I noticed it was active today ??.

You should be able to scrape the website using a headless browser such as Puppeteer. Using Puppeteer you are able to access a URL and execute JavaScript or interact with the website as you would with an ordinary browser. Parsing the output DOM and storing it should then be relatively straightforward.

There are plenty of articles on this topic using Puppeteer.