In rstudio/chromote: Headless Chrome Web Browser Interface

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

Using JavaScript

One way to extract text from a page is to tell the browser to run JavaScript code that does it.

Synchronous version

library(chromote)
b <- ChromoteSession$new()

b$go_to("https://www.whatismybrowser.com/")

# Run JavaScript to extract text from the page
x <- b$Runtime$evaluate('document.querySelector(".corset .string-major a").innerText')
x$result$value
#> [1] "Chrome 75 on macOS (Mojave)"

Asynchronous version

library(chromote)
b <- ChromoteSession$new()

p <- b$Page$loadEventFired(wait_ = FALSE)
b$go_to("https://www.whatismybrowser.com/", wait_ = FALSE)
p$then(function(value) {
  b$Runtime$evaluate(
    'document.querySelector(".corset .string-major a").innerText'
  )
})$
then(function(value) {
  print(value$result$value)
})

Using Chrome DevTools Protocol commands

Another way is to use CDP commands to extract content from the DOM. This does not require executing JavaScript in the browser's context, but it is also not as flexible as JavaScript.

Synchronous version

library(chromote)
b <- ChromoteSession$new()

b$go_to("https://www.whatismybrowser.com/")
x <- b$DOM$getDocument()
x <- b$DOM$querySelector(x$root$nodeId, ".corset .string-major a")
b$DOM$getOuterHTML(x$nodeId)
#> $outerHTML
#> [1] "<a href=\"/detect/what-version-of-chrome-do-i-have\">Chrome 75 on macOS (Mojave)</a>"

Asynchronous version

library(chromote)
b <- ChromoteSession$new()

b$go_to("https://www.whatismybrowser.com/", wait_ = FALSE)$
then(function(value) {
  b$DOM$getDocument()
})$
then(function(value) {
  b$DOM$querySelector(value$root$nodeId, ".corset .string-major a")
})$
then(function(value) {
  b$DOM$getOuterHTML(value$nodeId)
})$
then(function(value) {
  print(value)
})