RSelenium and Javascript

Question

I'm fairly proficient in R, but completely ignorant regarding javaScript and other languages. I would like to like to access information on this publicly-available data set (http://fyed.elections.on.ca/fyed/en/form_page_en.jsp). In particular, I have a list of several thousand postal codes of the form ('A1A1A1') in a data frame. I would like to submit each of these postal codes to this website and then extract the name of the electoral district that is returned. RSelenium seems ideal, but I cannot figure out how to get the javascript to work. I am working on a Mac OS 10.9.5, with R 3.0.3 and RSelenium_1.3. Firefox is v. 33 and Selenium is 2.44. The following script works.

require(RSelenium)
checkForServer()
startServer()
remDr<-remoteDriver()
remDr$open()
remDr$getStatus()
remDr$navigate("http://fyed.elections.on.ca/fyed/en/form_page_en.jsp")

#After inspecting the source code, you can see the input box has the id 'pcode', for postal code
webElem<-remDr$findElement(using = 'id', value = "pcode")
webElem$getElementAttribute('id')

#This is where I am stuck
remDr$executeScript(script='arguments[0].click(m1p4v4)', list(webElem))

#Utlimately, I have a list of several thousand postal codes, so I would like to create a loop     through to extract all the district names that are stored on the pages that are returned with a successful javascript (see previous command). Three real postal codes that return results are as follows:  
p.codes<-c('m1p4v4', 'n3t2y3', 'n2h3v1')

I feel like I just don't understand the javascript commands necessary or the syntax of executeScript to make this work. I'd appreciate any help.

jdharrison · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-25 01:28:00Z

You dont need to use executeScript here:

require(RSelenium)
checkForServer()
startServer()
remDr<-remoteDriver()
remDr$open()
remDr$getStatus()
remDr$navigate("http://fyed.elections.on.ca/fyed/en/form_page_en.jsp")

p.codes<-c('m1p4v4', 'n3t2y3', 'n2h3v1')
webElem<-remDr$findElement(using = 'id', value = "pcode")
webElem$sendKeysToElement(list(p.codes[1])) # send the first post code to the element

remDr$findElement("id", "en_btn_arrow")$clickElement() # find the submit button and click it

if you wanted to use executeScript instead you would replace the last line with:

remDr$executeScript("arguments[0].click();"
                , list(remDr$findElement("id", "en_btn_arrow")))

executeScript takes a script as an argument and a list. If any elements of the list are of class webElement then they can be referred to in the script like a DOM element. In this case the first element (zero index in JavaScript) is a webElement and we ask to click it in our JavaScript.

Furthermore if you examine the source code behind the button you will find when it is pressed it calls document.pcode.submit() so more simply in this case if you wanted to use executeScript you could do:

remDr$executeScript("document.pcode.submit();")

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