Web is rapidly transitioning to CSR model, old school tools for client-side web automation like curl and wget are becoming less and less useful, and yet I cannot find a good CSR web automation tool. Are there any? - essentially a modern browser engine with GUI replaced by a scripting backend for parsing a rendered DOM document and simulating user inputs. Yes, I know curl can be used to interact with REST APIs supplying data to CSR scripts, but analysing the workings of these APIs is usually time consuming

https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer

The API is huge. An easier start is to look at the examples:

https://github.com/puppeteer/puppete...main/examples/

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What is this CSR model?
I don't see it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSR

That said, wget and curl do not deal with javascript, which can make scraping impossible.
I have used 'phantomjs' for such tasks, or simply 'chromium --headless' (download DOM first, then use other tools to inspect).
python has tools for that, too.

You want to take a look at Web-Driver and implemenations like Selenium or Watir. Maybe the Molybdenum extension for Firefox is still alive; then this may be sufficient for small projects. I saw an enterprise base its whole testing environment on Molybdenum. It worked until approximately 150 subsequent tests had been integrated and the system choked.

... choked on a multi-tier Web-Application. *)


But even for simple tasks, rather try anything “Web-Driver”. It is enough fun to motivate for more.

*) At that moment, they recruited me to sort out the mess. Today I know I was dumb. But ask me about web-driver, if need be.

Client-side rendering. The worst thing that happened to the web.

You are either going to have to run the scripts on the client and spit out the result, or get the page source and follow it back one step at a time. I just posted a lighter resource python script to help with that. You don't have to use tkinter. You can spit out items to shell. That's why I made the script modular like that. Copy/Paste just the parts that you want.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...er-4175697045/

A web browsers engine that already knows how to run scripts is ideal for this. Spit out all of the requests that the web browsers engine is making.

youtube-dl will extract video data for a lot of sites.

Another option is to open the web inspector of the browser, then refresh the page, look for item.

Ah, javascript. Well, mostly. So my previous reply applies. Seriously, these tools exist, more than just a couple. Maybe your search fu is weak.

edi: more specific advice would require more specificity from your side.