PhantomJS create page from string

Question

Is it possible to create a page from a string?

example:

html = '<html><body>blah blah blah</body></html>'

page.open(html, function(status) {
  // do something
});

I have already tried the above with no luck....

Also, I think it's worth mentioning that I'm using nodejs with phantomjs-node(https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node)

Thanks!

score 122 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 02 '12 at 05:20

122

It's very simple, take a look at the colorwheel.js example.

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.content = '<html><body><p>Hello world</p></body></html>';

That's all! Then you can manipulate the page, e.g. render it as an image.

answered Aug 02 '12 at 05:20

Ariya Hidayat

12,523
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I'm super late on this but... this only works when using the cli version of phantom. Not possible with the plugin I'm using... again. – mike Mar 13 '14 at 18:55
4

@mike, this isn't node.js code, this is the phantom script and can be used with the many npm phantom modules I've seen. – japrescott May 29 '14 at 17:55
1

Will this also render javascript embedded in the html string? like '..blahblah' – sjdirect Oct 27 '15 at 18:01
1

@sjdirect For that you're probably better off doing `page.injectJs("someotherpagemodifyingcode.js");` – XåpplI'-I0llwlg'I - Nov 18 '15 at 12:45

rahulroy9202 · Answer 2 · 2015-08-05T08:51:47.673

To do this you need to set the page content to your string.

phantom.create(function (ph) {
  ph.createPage(function (page) {
      page.set('viewportSize', {width:1440,height:900})

      //like this
      page.set('content', html);

      page.render(path_to_pdf, function() { 
        //now pdf is written to disk.
        ph.exit();
      });
  });
});

you need to use page.set() to set the html content.

as per https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node#functionality-details

Properties can't be get/set directly.
Instead use page.get('version', callback) or page.set('viewportSize', {width:640,height:480}), etc.

Nested objects can be accessed by including dots in keys, such as page.set('settings.loadImages', false)

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 31 '12 at 17:48

Looking at the phantomjs API, page.open requires a URL as the first argument, not an HTML string. This is why the what you tried does not work.

However, one way that you might be able to achieve the effect of creating a page from a string is to host an empty "skeleton page," somewhere with a URL (could be localhost), and then include Javascript (using includeJs) into the empty page. The Javascript that you include into the blank page can use document.write("<p>blah blah blah</p>") to dynamically add content to the webpage.

I've ever done this, but AFAIK this should work.

Sample skeleton page:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head></head>
<body></body>
</html>

I figured as much... I saw something where someone was loading in local files and pushing them into an array then "opening" them with Phantom. I thought they were actually loading in the html content but after looking again I realized it was just the filename! I believe the above should work for me just fine.... thanks for the assistance! — mike, Jul 31 '12 at 19:07

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 11 '13 at 22:27

Just wanted to mention I recently had a similar need and discovered that I could pass file:// style references as an URL param, so I dumped my HTML string into a local file then passed the full path to my capture script (django_screamshot) which basically uses casperjs and phantomjs + a capture.js script.

Anyway it just works and its reasonably fast..

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 06 '15 at 18:54

I got the following to work in PhantomJS version 2.0.0. Whereas before, I was using page.open() to open a page from the filesystem and set a callback:

page.open("bench.html", pageLoadCallback);

Now, I accomplish the same thing from a string variable with the HTML page. The page.setContent() method requires a URL as the second argument, and this uses fs.absolute() to construct a file:// URL.

page.onLoadFinished = pageLoadCallback;
page.setContent(bench_str, "file://" + fs.absolute(".") + "/bench.html");

PhantomJS create page from string

5 Answers5

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