My goal is to develop an automated means to obtain the number of followers for each of a list of WordPress blog feeds (eg https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/93815501), which display the number of followers in a way that is captured by a copy-and-paste but is not in the HTML page source code. In order for these pages to display properly I need to be logged into a WordPress account and have JavaScript enabled in the browser.

So far I have the following code:

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::TreeBuilder;
print HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_url('https://wordpress.com/read/feed
+s/94271045')->as_text;

[download]

This code produces the following output:

> WordPress.comPlease enable JavaScript in your browser to enjoy WordPress.com.

Naively it seems to me that since my browser can interpret a web page using JavaScript without any a priori information, Perl should be able to as well. Is this possible? If not, why not?

I'm a Perl novice who wants to get code running without learning Perl "from the ground up". My strategy has been to find working code samples that do pieces of what I want, then change them incrementally until they do all I want. I'm using Strawberry Perl on Windows.

Can you offer guidance or link to somewhere that explains it for novices like me? Thank you.

In reply to Running JavaScript from within Perl by anautismobserver

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