Month: January 2017

Creating a Chrome Plugin to Scrape A Page (using jQuery)

chrisbitting, , Leave a comment

If you’ve played w/ Chrome extensions at all, you know they are super powerful. I recently wanted to visit a bunch of pages, and extract some info from each page. I could easily run some jQuery script in the console of each page to do this, but I wanted a quick and easy way to do this. Creating a Chrome extension, that includes jQuery, to run locally is pretty simple. Below are the different files (5 of them) you’ll need (put these all in a single folder).

After creating these and adding your code, add to Chrome by going to Extensions > Load unpacked extension and choose your folder.

1: manifest.json

{
 "name": "Your Extension Name",
 "description": "This was easy",
 "version": "1.1",
 "background": {
 "scripts": [ "jquery-3.1.1.min.js","background.js","content.js"]
 },
 "permissions": [
 "tabs", "http://*/*", "https://*/*"
 ],
 "browser_action": {
 "default_title": "My Extension Title",
 "default_icon": "a-cool-logo.png"
 },
 "manifest_version": 1
}

2: jquery-3.1.1.min.js (get a copy from jquery.com)

 

3: a-cool-logo.png (16px x 16px)

 

4: background.js

chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function(tab) {
 chrome.extension.getBackgroundPage().console.log('your plugin gonna do something');
//maybe see if your plugin should be allowed to run
 if (tab.url.indexOf("/maybeCheckAurl/") !== -1) {
 
chrome.tabs.executeScript(null, { file: "jquery-3.1.1.min.js" }, function() {
 chrome.tabs.executeScript(null, { file: "content.js" });
});
 
 }
 
});

5: content.js (the magic happen here)

//i check to make sure jQuery is loaded
if (jQuery) { 
 
 jQuery(".someclass a").each( function() { 
 
//log the results 
 console.log($(this).attr("href"));

//maybe do something with them
 $.get( "http://yourapi"), function( data ) {});
 
 });
 
} else {
 alert('no jq');
}
Creating a Chrome Plugin to Scrape A Page (using jQuery)

Accessing the Cloudflare API in C#

chrisbitting6 Comments

shutterstock_328592903Cloudflare provides security, CDN and more for your websites. If you’re using the Cloudflare caching to speed up your sites (it really is fast) you may want to purge their cache from your application (instead of waiting X days). Cloudflare provides an API that seems to offer everything you’d possible need. I wanted to do this from c#, but did’t find any great libraries or code that was using their newest API (v4).

Below is some quick simple code that I’ve found to work great so far for me. It’s pretty basic, and doesn’t require many external libraries (just JSON.net). Let me know your thoughts and if it helps you.

//define somethings we'll need for the api
string apiEndpoint = "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4";

//user info here
string userEmail = "youremail@something.com";

//this is your Global api key found in "my account"
string userAPIkey = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";

//domain your working with:
string domain = "http://www.yourdomain.com";

//let's get our zone ID (we'll need this for other requests
HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.CreateHttp(apiEndpoint + "/zones?name=" + domain + "/&status=active&page=1&per_page=20&order=status&direction=desc&match=all");
request.Method = "Get";
request.ContentType = "application/json";
request.Headers.Add("X-Auth-Email", userEmail);
request.Headers.Add("X-Auth-Key", userAPIkey);

string srZoneResult = "";
using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))

	srZoneResult = (streamReader.ReadToEnd());

dynamic zoneResult = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(srZoneResult);

if (zoneResult.result != null)
{
	//get our zoneID
	string zoneId = zoneResult.result[0].id;

	//some pages to purge the cache on:
	byte[] data = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(@"{""files"":[""http://www.yourdomain.com/about/""]}");

	request = WebRequest.CreateHttp(apiEndpoint + "/zones/" + zoneId + "/purge_cache");
	request.Method = "DELETE";
	request.ContentType = "application/json";
	request.ContentLength = data.Length;

	request.Headers.Add("X-Auth-Email", userEmail);
	request.Headers.Add("X-Auth-Key", userAPIkey);

	using (Stream outStream = request.GetRequestStream())
	{
		outStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
		outStream.Flush();
	}

	string srPurgeResult = "";
	using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
	using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))

		srPurgeResult = (streamReader.ReadToEnd());

	dynamic purgeResult = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(srPurgeResult);

	//was it a success (hopefully it = true)
	textBox1.Text = purgeResult.success;
}
Accessing the Cloudflare API in C#