Monitoring specific responses with Puppeteer: Any methods available?

Other Questions Puppeteer
1

Hey everyone! I’ve been playing around with Puppeteer, the headless Chrome API for Node.js. I’m trying to figure out how to watch for a particular response and then do something based on that.

I’ve checked out the requestfinish and response events, but they’re giving me info on all the requests and responses that have happened on the page. That’s not quite what I’m after.

Is there a way to zero in on just one specific response? I’d love to be able to trigger some actions when that particular response comes through.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m thinking:

const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();

// Imaginary function to watch for a specific response
page.watchForResponse('https://example.com/api/data', (response) => {
  console.log('Got the response we were waiting for!');
  // Do something with the response
});

await page.goto('https://example.com');

Any ideas on how to make this work? Thanks in advance for your help!

2

yo, i’ve dealt with this before! try using page.on(‘response’, async (response) => {}) and check the URL inside. something like:

if (response.url() === ‘https://example.com/api/data’) {
// do ur thing here
}

works like a charm for me. good luck with ur project!

3

I’ve grappled with this exact issue in my Puppeteer projects. One trick that’s worked wonders for me is using the page.setRequestInterception(true) method combined with page.on('request'). This approach lets you intercept and modify requests, but it’s also great for monitoring specific responses.

Here’s a snippet that might help:

await page.setRequestInterception(true);
page.on('request', async (request) => {
  if (request.url() === 'https://example.com/api/data') {
    const response = await request.response();
    if (response) {
      const responseBody = await response.text();
      console.log('Got the response:', responseBody);
      // Do your thing with the response here
    }
  }
  request.continue();
});

This method gives you fine-grained control over which responses you’re tracking. It’s been a game-changer for my more complex scraping tasks. Just remember to call request.continue() to avoid hanging the page load!

4

I’ve encountered a similar challenge in my work with Puppeteer. One effective approach is to utilize the page.waitForResponse() method. This allows you to wait for a specific response before proceeding. Here’s an example of how you might implement this:

await page.goto('https://example.com');
const response = await page.waitForResponse(
  (response) => response.url() === 'https://example.com/api/data'
);
const responseData = await response.json();
console.log('Response data:', responseData);

This method is particularly useful when you need to capture and process data from a specific API endpoint. It’s more targeted than the general response event listener and can lead to cleaner, more focused code.