Zombie.js Returns Improper Page Content

Question

Zombie.js Returns Improper Page Content

I am new to zombie and just trying to get a basic test running. I have the following code:

var Browser = require('zombie');

var startTime = +new Date();

Browser.visit("http://zombie.labnotes.org/", function(e, browser) {
    var duration;

    console.log("Successfully visted the page");
    console.log(browser.html());

    duration = (+(new Date())) - startTime;
    console.log("Finished in (milliseconds): " + duration);
});

For some reason all I get back in the console is:

Successfully visted the page

<html>
  <head></head>
  <body></body>
</html>
Finished in (milliseconds): 5020

This is obviously not the right mark up and it takes quite a bit of time (5 seconds) to do that. Any ideas?

UPDATE: ended up switching to a simpler model using request and jsdom. Here is the code I used: var request = require('request'), jsdom = require('jsdom');

//Tell the request that we want to fetch youtube.com, send the results to a callback function
request({uri: 'http://youtube.com'}, function(err, response, body){
    var self = this;
    self.items = [];

    //Just a basic error check
    if(err && response.statusCode !== 200){console.log('Request error.');}

    //Send the body param as the HTML code we will parse in jsdom
    //also tell jsdom to attach jQuery in the scripts and loaded from jQuery.com
    jsdom.env({
        html: body,
        scripts: ['http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.min.js']
    }, function(err, window){
        //Use jQuery just as in a regular HTML page
        var $ = window.jQuery;

        console.log(body);
    });
});

Taken from: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/how-to-scrape-web-pages-with-node-js-and-jquery/

But I would still like to know what went wrong with Zombie as I would like to use it for testing on other projects.

javascript
http
node.js
zombie.js

Answer 1

Browser is the class that is loaded through the require. You want to create a variable that is an instance of Browser and then call visit using that variable. Your code should be:

var Browser = require('zombie');

var startTime = +new Date();

my_browser = new Browser(); // Here's where you need to call new
my_browser.visit("http://zombie.labnotes.org/", function(e, browser) {
    var duration;

    console.log("Successfully visted the page");
    console.log(browser.html());

    duration = (+(new Date())) - startTime;
    console.log("Finished in (milliseconds): " + duration);
});

Answer 2

It seems to work now that I upgraded to a new version of both Node.js and Zombie.js. Note that you cannot use a pre version of Node with zombie.js (one of the dependencies will fail saying that).

Use NVM to install the latest stable version (version 0.8.9 at time of writing).