Hey everyone! I’m hitting a wall with my Android project. I need to scrape web content that’s loaded by JavaScript, but I can’t find a good headless browser option for Android. PhantomJS-like solutions seem non-existent.
I’ve tried Jsoup, but it doesn’t work with JS-loaded content. Some folks suggested using a WebView without a layout, but that feels hacky and I’d rather not deal with contexts.
My ideal solution would be:
- Works on Android
- Handles JavaScript-loaded content
- Doesn’t need a UI
- Runs synchronously (for RxJava compatibility)
Does anyone know of a tool or library that fits the bill? Or maybe a clever workaround? I’m open to creative solutions here. Thanks in advance for any help!
I encountered a similar problem in one of my Android projects and experimented with an approach that avoided a WebView or headless browser. I used OkHttp to fetch the HTML content and then extracted and executed the JavaScript with a lightweight engine such as Mozilla Rhino or Duktape to generate the dynamic content.
This method let me process JavaScript-loaded content synchronously without dealing with UI contexts. Although it may require some fine-tuning based on the website, it proved to be a practical solution in my experience.
hav u tried using an API? many sites provide APIs to get data without scraping, making things cleaner and more reliable. else, check out cloud-based scraping services—they manage headless browsers so u just use API calls from ur app
Have you considered using a hybrid approach? I’ve had success combining a local HTML parser like Jsoup with a remote scraping service. Essentially, you fetch the initial HTML with OkHttp, parse it locally, then send specific JavaScript-heavy elements to a cloud service for rendering. This way, you maintain control over most of the process while offloading the tricky JS execution. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s worked well for me in projects where a full headless browser wasn’t feasible on Android. Just be mindful of rate limits and costs if you go this route.