How does Scrapy (Open Source Web Scraping Framework) works? - parsing

Quoting from Scrapy Official Documentation :
Scrapy comes with its own mechanism for extracting data. They’re called selectors because they “select” certain parts of the HTML document specified either by XPath or CSS expressions. Source
After reading this, I'm still not sure whether Scrapy works by directly selecting parts of the HTML document by using XPath/CSS expressions or selecting nodes from DOM Tree which is rendered by the browser?
Still confused whether DOM Parsing and HTML Parsing is the same or not...

After reading this, I'm still not sure whether Scrapy works by directly selecting parts of the HTML document by using XPath/CSS expressions or selecting nodes from DOM Tree which is rendered by the browser?
For sure the former, as there is definitely no browser involved. Even the "CSS" part is just syntatic sugar for the XPath part -- which one can see by printing out an "in progress" Selector:
>>> print(Selector(text="<html><div class='foo'></div></html>").css(".foo"))
[<Selector xpath="descendant-or-self::*[#class and contains(concat(' ', normalize-space(#class), ' '), ' foo ')]" data='<div class="foo"></div>'>]
Still confused whether DOM Parsing and HTML Parsing is the same or not...
Strictly speaking, I believe they are different. For example, lxml is able to parse HTML, but it does so in its own way, and materializes an object tree that is xml.etree compatible, and not that of the DOM. There is a minimal DOM library that html5lib can target, which is about the closest you'll get to "what a browser would build"

Related

In Reflected XSS, why do we need to sanitize single quote, double quote, ampersand, and backslash

Based on this article
https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/how-to-prevent-cross-site-scripting-attacks/
Reflected XXS happens when data injected is reflected in the response. I get the idea that if I, for example, have a search box in my page and the search term inputted by a user is displayed in the page, someone could write as a search term:
<script>alert('x');</script>
and that would be read as regular HTML element in the page that displays the response.
But lets say greater than and less than are already blocked in input (meaning they wouldn't be able to put in script tags or any tag), what's the issue if I allow single quote, double quote, ampersand, and backslash reflected in the response. I'm trying to make sense of it but I am not sure if I am understanding correctly.
Today the web stack is big and complex with many languages. We have HTML, CSS, JavaScript, VB-Script, SVG, URLs…
Each with its own rules for:
Encoding
Quoting
Commenting
Escaping
Also, each one can be nested inside each other:
And just replacing <> fixes some issues, but not all of them as you don't know where you data will end up, is it in HTML? as a HTML Attribute? inside a JavaScript string? Each one needs different encoding to become safe.
So, the world is a bit more complicated.....

Format dart code as html

I am knocking together a quick debugging view of a backend, as a small set of admin HTML pages (driven by angulardart, but not sure that is critical).
I get back from my XHR call a complex JSON object. I want to see that on the HTML page formatted nicely. It doesn't have to be a great implementation, as its just a debug ui, but the goal is to format the object instead of having it be one long string with no newlines.
I looked at trying to pretty print JSON in dart then putting that inside <pre></pre> tags, as well as just dumping the dart Map object to string (again, inside or not inside <pre></pre> tags. But not getting to where I want.
Even searched pub for something similar, such as a syntax highlighter that would output html, but didn't find something obvious.
Any recommendations?
I think what you're looking for is:
Format your JSON so it's readable
Have syntax highlight
For 1 - This can be done with JsonEncoder with indent
For 2 - You can use the JS lib called HighlightJs pretty easily by appending your formatted json into a marked-up div. (See highlightjs' doc to see what I mean)

How to get http tag text by id using lua

There is a webpage parser, which takes a page contains several tags, in a certain structure, where divs are badly nested. I need to extract a certain div element, and copy it and all its content to a new html file.
Since I am new to lua, I may need basic clarification for things might seem simple.
Thanks,
The ease of extraction of data is going to largely depend on the page itself. If the page uses the exact same tag information throughout its entirety, it'll be much more difficult to extract than it would if it has named tags.
If you're able to find a version of the page that returns json format, then you're that much better off. Here's a snippet of code on something I wrote to grab definitions from a webpage that did not have json format:
local actualword, definition = string.match(wayup,"<html.-<td class='word'>%c(.-)%c</td>.-<div class=\"definition\">(.-)</div>")
Essentially, this code searched down the page until it found the class "word", and took the word after it (%c is the pattern for control characters). It continued on to "definition" and captured that, as well.
As you can see, it's a bit convoluted, but I had the luck of having specifically named tags for what I wanted.
This is edited to fit your comment. As a side note that I should have mentioned before, if you're familiar with regular expressions, you can use its model to capture what you need. In this case, it's capturing the string in its totality:
local data = string.match(page, "(<div id=\"aa\"><div>.-</div>.-</div>)")
It's rarely the fault of the language, but rather the webpage itself, that makes it hard to data mine anything. Since webpages could literally have hundreds of lines of code, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what you want without coming across garbage information. It's why I prefer a simplified result such as json, since Lua has a json module that can encode/decode and you can get your precise information.

simple formatting/parsing in markdown for blockquotes

I'm using markdown in my site and I would like to do some simple parsing for news articles.
How can I parse markdown to pull all blockquotes and links, so I can highlight them separately from the rest of the document
For example I would like to parse the first blockquote ( >) in the document so I can push it to the top no matter where it occurs in the document. (Similar to what many news sites do, to highlight certain parts of an article.) but then de-blockquote it for the main body. So it occurs twice (once in the highlighted always at the top and then normally as it occurs in the document).
I will assume you're trying to do this at render-time, when the markdown is going to be converted to HTML. To point you in the right direction, one way you could go about this would be to
Convert the markdown to HTML
Pass the HTML to Nokogiri
Grab the first <blockquote>, copy it, and inject it into the top of the Nokogiri node tree
The result would be a duplicate of the first <blockquote>.
Redcarpet 2 is a great gem for converting Markdown to HTML. Nokogiri is your best bet for HTML parsing.
I can write sample code if necessary, but the documentation for both gems is thorough and this task is trivial enough to just piece together bits from examples within the docs. This at least answers your question of how to go about doing it.
Edit
Depending on the need, this could be done with a line of jQuery too.
$('article').prepend($($('article blockquote').get(0)).clone())
Given the <article> DOM element for an article on your page, grab the first <blockquote>, clone it, and prepend it to the top of the <article>.
I know wiki markup (i.e. wikicloth for ruby) has similar implementations as you're after for parsing links, categories, and references. Though I'm not sure about block quotes, but it may be better suited.
Something like:
data = "[[ this ]] is a [[ link ]] and another [http://www.google.com Google]. This is a <ref>reference</ref>, but this is a [[Category:Test]]. This is in another [[de:Sprache]]"
wiki = WikiCloth::Parser.new(:data => data)
wiki.to_html
puts "Internal Links: #{wiki.internal_links.size}"
puts "External Links: #{wiki.external_links.size}"
puts "References: #{wiki.references.size}"
puts "Categories: #{wiki.categories.size} [#{wiki.categories.join(",")}]"
puts "Languages: #{wiki.languages.size} [#{wiki.languages.keys.join(",")}]"
I haven't seen any such parsers available for markdown. Using redcarpet, converting to HTML, then using Nokogiri does seem a bit convoluted.

setting innerHTML in xul

I have in my browser.xul code,what I am tyring to is to fetch data from an html file and to insert it into my div element.
I am trying to use div.innerHTML but I am getting an exception:
Component returned failure code: 0x804e03f7
[nsIDOMNSHTMLElement.innerHTML]
I tried to parse the HTML using Components.interfaces.nsIScriptableUnescapeHTML and to append the parsed html into my div but my problem is that style(attribute and tag) and script isn`t parsed.
First a warning: if your HTML data comes from the web then you are trying to build a security hole into your extension. HTML code from the web should never be trusted (even when coming from your own web server and via HTTPS) and you should really use nsIScriptableUnescapeHTML. Styles should be part of your extension, using styles from the web isn't safe. For more information: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Displaying_web_content_in_an_extension_without_security_issues
As to your problem, this error code is NS_ERROR_HTMLPARSER_STOPPARSING which seems to mean a parsing error. I guess that you are trying to feed it regular HTML code rather than XHTML (which would be XML-compliant). Either way, a better way to parse XHTML code would be DOMParser, this gives you a document that you can then insert into the right place.
If the point is really to parse HTML code (not XHTML) then you have two options. One is using an <iframe> element and displaying your data there. You can generate a data: URL from your HTML data:
frame.src = "data:text/html;charset=utf-8," + encodeURIComponent(htmlData);
If you don't want to display the data in a frame you will still need a frame (can be hidden) that has an HTML document loaded (can be about:blank). You then use Range.createContextualFragment() to parse your HTML string:
var range = frame.contentDocument.createRange();
range.selectNode(frame.contentDocument.documentElement);
var fragment = range.createContextualFragment(htmlData);
XML documents don't have innerHTML, and nsIScriptableUnescapeHTML is one way to get the html parsed but it's designed for uses where the HTML might not be safe; as you've found out it throws away the script nodes (and a few other things).
There are a couple of alternatives, however. You can use the responseXML property, although this may be suboptimal unless you're receiving XHTML content.
You could also use an iframe. It may seem old-fashioned, but an iframe's job is to take a url (the src property) and render the content it receives, which necessarily means parsing it and building a DOM. In general, when an extension running as chrome does this, it will have to take care not to give the remote content the same chrome privilages. Luckily that's easily managed; just put type="content" on the iframe. However, since you're looking to import the DOM into your XUL document wholesale, you must have already ensured that this remote content will always be safe. You're evidently using an HTTPS connection, and you've taken extra care to verify the identity of the server by making sure it sends the right certificate. You've also verified that the server hasn't been hacked and isn't delivering malicious content.

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