Python: Setting JavaScript Variables With Beautifulsoup?

Question

Most of the pertinent questions I see answered online revolve around accessing JS variables from parsed pages. I want to go the other way as I have an HTML page which is being printed in python by beautifulsoup. Pretty easy stuff except that the page contains a bunch of dynamic JavaScript (GUI stuff) which I am not sure how to pre-populate on render without things getting messy.

To clarify: The page is being rendered by a python script running on a server. The python script retrieves a bunch of market data which it slices/dices and then is supposed to populate various JS variables in my HTML page. Again the static HTML is fairly straightforward and I've done that before. But populating the JS variables and arrays could get tricky. FYI - this is a single page and thus it's not worth setting up Flask or Django.

Finally, I wonder if it may just be easier to skip beautifulsoup and simply parse a static HTML file and pre-populate placeholder strings.

Thanks for any pointers, insights, or even better: examples ;-)

Redacks · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-05 13:07:33Z

1

If I understood it correctly you could try to create an script tag at the end of the html file with the help of beautifulsoup. In this script tag you could just set the variables like this.

your_soup is the soup element of your page

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

variable = "Example"
temp_soup = BeautifulSoup('<script>var yourvariable = ' + variable + '</script>')
script_tag = temp_soup.html.body.script
your_soup.body.insert(len(your_soup.body.contents), script_tag)

I hope it works.

answered Mar 5, 2021 at 13:07

Redacks

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Molecool Over a year ago

Yeah maybe I'm overthinking this. I also wonder if it may be just easier to read in the entire HTML file (incl. script, CSS tags, etc.) and just replace a bunch of placeholder strings. I'm sure there's a python lib for that out there.

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