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copied!<p>You are looking for <a href="http://watir.com/" rel="noreferrer">Watir</a> which runs a real browser and allows you to perform every action you can think of on a web page. There's a similar project called <a href="http://selenium.rubyforge.org/" rel="noreferrer">Selenium</a>.</p> <p>You can even use Watir with a so-called 'headless' browser on a linux machine.</p> <h2>Watir headless example</h2> <p>Suppose we have this HTML:</p> <pre><code><p id="hello">Hello from HTML</p> </code></pre> <p>and this Javascript:</p> <pre><code>document.getElementById('hello').innerHTML = 'Hello from JavaScript'; </code></pre> <p>(Demo: <a href="http://jsbin.com/ivihur" rel="noreferrer">http://jsbin.com/ivihur</a>)</p> <p>and you wanted to get the dynamically inserted text. First, you need a Linux box with <code>xvfb</code> and <code>firefox</code> installed, for example on Ubuntu do:</p> <pre><code>$ apt-get install xvfb firefox </code></pre> <p>You will also need the <code>watir-webdriver</code> and <code>headless</code> gems so go ahead and install them as well:</p> <pre><code>$ gem install watir-webdriver headless </code></pre> <p>Then you can read the dynamic content from the page with something like this:</p> <pre><code>require 'rubygems' require 'watir-webdriver' require 'headless' headless = Headless.new headless.start browser = Watir::Browser.new browser.goto 'http://jsbin.com/ivihur' # our example el = browser.element :css => '#hello' puts el.text browser.close headless.destroy </code></pre> <p>If everything went right, this will output:</p> <pre><code>Hello from JavaScript </code></pre> <p>I know this runs a browser in the background as well, but it's the easiest solution to your problem i could come up with. It will take quite a while to start the browser, but subsequent requests are quite fast. (Running <code>goto</code> and then fetching the dynamic text above multiple times took about 0.5 sec for each request on my Rackspace Cloud Server).</p> <p>Source: <a href="http://watirwebdriver.com/headless/" rel="noreferrer">http://watirwebdriver.com/headless/</a></p>

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