As it happens that skyscanner only provides their api to big commercial websites, I wanted to build a small application on my own to retrieve the results for multiple destinations for my own purpose (non commercial).
I found that getting the result of a flight search seems to be pretty difficult as the page takes a few seconds to complete the flight search and display the results.
Using wget, lynx, links2 or edbrowse didn't work for me, as I got the result that javascript is not enabled in my browser, even when links2 was compiled with javascript support. Maybe I did something wrong, I don't know.
However phantomjs provided the best effort so far and I tried multiple code-fragments to retrieve the flight search results.
Sources from:
[Stackoverflow#1][1]
[Stackoverflow#2][2]
[Techslides][3]
[Stackoverflow#3][4]
[Stackoverflow#4][5]
[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18526140/how-to-get-html-generated-from-javascript-using-phantomjs
[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28209509/get-javascript-rendered-html-source-using-phantomjs
[3]: http://techslides.com/grabbing-html-source-code-with-phantomjs-or-casperjs
[4]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12450868/how-to-print-html-source-to-console-with-phantomjs
[5]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8692038/phantomjs-page-dump-script-issue
Even with the time lag described in [Stackoverflow#4][5] it did not work. The scripts resulted (in case of a successful return) only an error page of skyscanner, saying that they got a problem.
The last effort I tried which resulted in the described error-page was:
var page = new WebPage(),t, address;
var fs = require('fs');
var url = 'http://www.skyscanner.at/transport/fluge/nyca/lax/150626/150627/flugpreise-von-new-york-nach-los-angeles-international-im-juni-2015.html?adults=1&children=0&infants=0&cabinclass=economy&rtn=1&preferdirects=false&outboundaltsenabled=false&inboundaltsenabled=false';
address = encodeURI(url);
page.open(address, function (status) {
if (status !== 'success') {
console.log('FAIL to load the address');
} else {
f = null;
var markup = page.content;
console.log(markup);
try {
f = fs.open('htmlcode.txt', "w");
f.write(markup);
f.close();
} catch (e) {
console.log(e);
}
}
phantom.exit();
});
Did someone try something like that before and was successful? How did you get it working? I am trying to build a php-based and/or shell-script based solution on a gui-less Debian-Linux system.
