How to parse a javascript data list using R

Question

I use R to parse html code, and I would like to know the most efficient way to cut the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var utag_data = {
  environnement : "prod",
  device : getDevice(),
  displaytype : getDisplay($(window).innerWidth()),
  pagename : "adview",
  pagetype : "annonce"}</script>

I started to do this:

infos = unlist(xpathApply(page,
                          '//script[@type="text/javascript"]',
                          xmlValue))
infos=gsub('\n|  ','',infos)
infos=gsub("var utag_data = ","",infos)
fromJSON(infos)

And the above code returns something really strange:

$nvironnemen
[1] "prod"

$evic
NULL

$isplaytyp
NULL

$agenam
[1] "adview" etc.

I would like to know how to do this very efficiently: how to parse a list of data correctly in javascript? Thank.

Answer 1

I have not tried my code, but I think that your regular expressions gsub()can be overly aggressive (which is caused by a name transition).

javascript- V8, DOM- getDevice() getDisplay() , V8:

library(V8)
library(rvest)

pg <- read_html('<script type="text/javascript">
var utag_data = {
  environnement : "prod",
  device : getDevice(),
  displaytype : getDisplay($(window).innerWidth()),
  pagename : "adview",
  pagetype : "annonce"}</script>')


script <- html_text(html_nodes(pg, xpath='//script[@type="text/javascript"]'))

ctx <- v8()

ctx$eval(script)
## Error: ReferenceError: getDevice is not defined

:

# we need to remove the function calls and replace them with blanks
# since both begin with 'getD' this is pretty easy:
script <- gsub("getD[[:alpha:]\\(\\)\\$\\.]+,", "'',", script)  

ctx$eval(script)
ctx$get("utag_data")

## $environnement
## [1] "prod"
## 
## $device
## [1] ""
## 
## $displaytype
## [1] ""
## 
## $pagename
## [1] "adview"
## 
## $pagetype
## [1] "annonce"