Accessing Firefox instance/generated source from outside

Hi all,

I may be totally off-topic for mozilla-general, If so please let me know
where to post this:

I have been looking elsewhere for a long time for a solution to a
problem I have in a project.

Pretext:
[
'Generated' source includes all modifications made by javascript at
runtime: In this way 'Generated' may (and often does) vary greatly from
the original source. I know that I can access this 'generated' source
rather simply by installing the web-developer extension and clicking
'View generated source' as opposed to 'View Source' (Ctrl+U).
]

For whatever reasons I need to access programmatically the 'generated'
source of a web page as parsed/interpreted/rendered by a webbrowser,
prefereably firefox. 

To make things more complicated I need to do all that preferably from a
command-line only shell. So far I have tried various ways including
various perl-based modules but always failed to access the html produced
by javascript. I came across 'mozilla -remote ' which led me to
investigate this way further. 

I could even imagine to run a minimalized X inside a VM where the
browser actually runs -- yet I need to get access to the DOM/GenSource
or an 'object handler' for firefox (preferably in perl :)

does anybody ever had a similar problem and was able to solve it?
Anybody can point me in some direction or give some helpful advice? 



TIA

CVH

Christian Hansel wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I may be totally off-topic for mozilla-general, If so please let me know
> where to post this:
> 
> I have been looking elsewhere for a long time for a solution to a
> problem I have in a project.
> 
> Pretext:
> [
> 'Generated' source includes all modifications made by javascript at
> runtime: In this way 'Generated' may (and often does) vary greatly from
> the original source. I know that I can access this 'generated' source
> rather simply by installing the web-developer extension and clicking
> 'View generated source' as opposed to 'View Source' (Ctrl+U).
> ]
> 
> For whatever reasons I need to access programmatically the 'generated'
> source of a web page as parsed/interpreted/rendered by a webbrowser,
> prefereably firefox. 
> 
> To make things more complicated I need to do all that preferably from a
> command-line only shell. So far I have tried various ways including
> various perl-based modules but always failed to access the html produced
> by javascript. I came across 'mozilla -remote ' which led me to
> investigate this way further. 
> 
> I could even imagine to run a minimalized X inside a VM where the
> browser actually runs -- yet I need to get access to the DOM/GenSource
> or an 'object handler' for firefox (preferably in perl :)
> 
> does anybody ever had a similar problem and was able to solve it?
> Anybody can point me in some direction or give some helpful advice? 
> 
> 
> 
> TIA
> 
> CVH
> 

Christian, you may or may not be off-topic for Mozilla General, but you 
would right on-topic in the mozilla.support.firefox group on this server.