I found a good standalone javascript interpreter (PhantomJS) and have written a few scripts that it can execute. I want to execute automatically what a page does (specifically, the county assessor's page that returns records for a parcel by its id). The page has a bunch of scripts, most of them not labeled, including the function I want. Can someone point me to some instructions on how to tease out of a page the functionality one wants?

If scripts aren't labeled do they execute in the order they appear in a page? Or must there be an event (e.g., a key click or a mouse rollover)?

I would like to help, but I'm not sure I understand the question. Can you expand on this?

I'll try and answer what I think the question is. I don't know of any way to tease script functions out of a webpage. When I want to take a function from a page I find somewhere else, I use Firefox's Web Developer > Inspector function. It will show you the page code and, as you hover over parts of the page, you can see what sections of code correspond to what on the page. Firefox also has a neat addon, Firebug, which can accomplish the opposite, where when you hover over a section of code it will show what it corresponds to on a page.

As for scripting on a page, they can be event driven, ordered or unordered. Unordered & non-event driven would usually mean they just load up as they load up, top to bottom, but showing up whenever they finish loading.

Does this help at all?

Steve

I want to fetch the ownership records of 167 parcels. I could fetch them all by hand; I'd rather not. The county assessor, who keeps the records, the website used to use a fetching mechanism I could automate the fetching of records from with lynx and the right argument. Now it uses javascript. The button of the page that activates the fetching of a record is a function, _doPostBack(SomeLongArgument) , inside an unlabeled script in a webpage.

I want to make that button do its work with an argument I specify. The button is inside an unlabeled javascript. From the examples on phantomjs.org it seems that I would use phantomjs to 'load' the page (load may not be the right word) and cause the execution of this script. But the script isn't labeled. (Some are.) If a javascript has a URI I can just execute it, but this javascript is in a page and has no label: how do I get it to execute? Pass it an argument?

Sorry, I did some research, but didn't come up with anything useful on injection without a URI. I will look further tomorrow.

Steve

Everything points to needing that URI to execute against. I don't have time tonight to look further, but perhaps there is a way of injecting the URI? What is your opinion on that?