Blenny Sparrow

Tools to Work with the 'Splash' JavaScript Rendering Service

This package works with Splash rendering servers which are really just a REST API & lua scripting interface to a QT browser. It's an alternative to the Selenium ecosystem which was really engineered for application testing & validation.

Sometimes, all you need is a page scrape after javascript has been allowed to roam wild and free over meticulously crafted HTML tags. So, this package does not do everything Selenium can in pure R (though, the Lua interface is equally as powerful and accessible via R), but if you're just trying to get a page back that needs javascript rendering, this is a nice, lightweight, consistent alternative.

It's also an alternative to phantomjs (which you can use in R within or without a Selenium context as it's it's own webdriver) and it may be useful to compare renderings between this package & phantomjs.