jQuery selectors on an ajax response string that is a full html page

Question

I'm trying to get some page details (page title, images on the page, etc.) of an arbitrarily entered URL/page. I have a back-end proxy script that I use via an ajax GET in order to return the full HTML of the remote page. Once I get the ajax response back, I'm trying to run several jQuery selectors on it to extract the page details. Here's the general idea:

$.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: base_url + "/Services/Proxy.aspx?url=" + url,
        success: function (data) {
            //data is now the full html string contained at the url

            //generally works for images
            var potential_images = $("img", data); 

            //doesn't seem to work even if there is a title in the HTML string
            var name = $(data).filter("title").first().text();

            var description = $(data).filter("meta[name='description']").attr("content"); 

        }
    });

Sometimes using $("selector", data) seems to work while other times $(data).filter("selector") seems to work. Sometimes, neither works. When I just inspect the contents of $(data), it seems that some nodes make it through, but some just disappear. Does anyone know a consistent way to run selectors on a full HTML string?

possible duplicate of parse html string with jquery

Qantas 94 Heavy
– Qantas 94 Heavy

2014-08-24 03:58:46 +00:00
Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 3:58 — Qantas 94 Heavy
– Qantas 94 Heavy, Commented Aug 24, 2014 at 3:58

Matt Ball · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-15 20:00:09Z

2

Your question is kind of vague, especially w/r/t what input causes what code to fail, and how. It could be malformed HTML that's mucking things up - but I can only guess.

That said, your best bet is to work with $(data) rather than data:

$.ajax({
    type: "GET",
    url: base_url + "/Services/Proxy.aspx?url=" + url,
    success: function(data) {
        var $data = $(data);

        //data is now the full html string contained at the url
        //generally works for images
        var potential_images = $("img", $data);

        //doesn't seem to work even if there is a title in the HTML string
        var name = $data.filter("title").first().text();

        var description = $data.filter("meta[name='description']").attr("content");
    }
});

answered Dec 15, 2010 at 20:00

Matt Ball

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1 Comment

Ben Over a year ago

Unfortunately the input could potentially be the HTML of any arbitrary page. I've tried with numerous popular websites including cnn.com, twitter.com, and espn.go.com -- all of which seem to have the same problems, especially with extracting the title.

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