Question

I will try to summarize the best I can what I need and what is blocking me to do it.

What I need

I need to append script tags to the head of an html file, BUT during my “build” process. I’m using ant as a automation build tool, and I would like to avoid placing tokens in my HTML file to then replace it with ant, or also I will like to avoid any midway solution using regular expression matching. Waht I would really like to use is plain javascript running through rhino javascript interpreter and exceute it easily from an ant task, and finally add the script tag dinamically.

What is blocking me?

I really don’t know anyway that I can load an html file without issuing a GET or a POST HTTP methods. Cause I’m building my code from source I don’t have it under an HTTP server, so I wish I could find someway to load the HTML DOM into a javascript variable and then write it with the new script tag that I need.

I need all the DOM manipulation features without having a browser that renders the HTML file.

Best!
Demian

Answer 1

From what I understand you would like to have a valid DOM object from an HTML file, as if you were running in a browser, but do it “offline”? e.g. be able to do a jQuery selector on the DOM and edit it?

• You can always start by looking into an embeded open source browser (http://www.chromium.org/)?
• But I would look into node.js, see this question Can I use jQuery with Node.js?

This will allow you to do DOM traversing and modifications without a browser as far as I understand