edelpero

#Heroku, Ruby on Rails and PhantomJS

In this post, I’m going to show you how to modify an existing Ruby on Rails app running on Heroku’s Cedar stack to use PhantomJS for screen scraping. If you’ve never heard of PhantomJS, it’s a command-line WebKit-based browser (that supports JavaScript, cookies, etc.).

Let’s get started. This is a high-level overview of the required steps:

• Modify your app to use multiple Heroku buildpacks.
• Extend your app to use both the Ruby as well as the PhantomJS buildpacks.
• Confirm that everything worked.

CatTail

// encode(decode) html text into html entity
var decodeHtmlEntity = function(str) {
  return str.replace(/&#(\d+);/g, function(match, dec) {
    return String.fromCharCode(dec);
  });
};

var encodeHtmlEntity = function(str) {
  var buf = [];
  for (var i=str.length-1;i>=0;i--) {