I am looking for a “Remote File Browser”. I thought I’d found one for my Windows 10, but I can not get it to even open to test. It is " [Remote File Browser] at this address: https://sourceforge.net/p/rfb/
I asked for help on the forum pages for it but never got a reply.
My situation is this:
I have a very large file of my old Comments on a web news site I want to get onto my PC for possibly a book I could write. The news web site has not helped me over come their communication error that shuts off the connection session in all Windows browsers except for EDGE which mostly handles them. If the communication link breaks, except for EDGE, I have to start all over to go through the file to open up next pages and the rest of the page in some longer Comments. Here are the specific details:
The remote file is set up so that only a few Comment show at any one time. Once logged in, I have to mouse click on the word “More” at the bottom of the Comments to get the next set of Comments displayed.
Within some of my longer Comments there are the words “See More” to display the rest of that Comment.
I at one time had a fellow write some Java script to find and mouse click on those words, but it didn’t work.
What I need is a remote browser window like browser for Ubuntu or Windows that I could have a solid communication like EDGE, and which I could have it scan for the words “More” and “See More” and mouse click on them to open up the entire file so I could copy and paste into my Word Processor.
The browser would not depend on EDGE.
It would also be nice it the browser could also control the copy and paste, but I expect that’s way too much to expect.
Can anyone suggest such a browser as I’ve described for Ubuntu 18.4
As I understand it, you are not looking for a “remote file browser” but for a way to display (and download) all the comments. Probably the best way to achieve that would be a script making use of the wget utility.
However, any solution to your problem, whether in a browser or with a script, depends heavily on the HTML and JavaScript of the page you are accessing. So, in order to get help, it might be useful if you actually posted the name of the news site. (We are all adults here and wouldn’t judge if it were a naughty site)
Chuckle, no naughty site. The news site is the Washington Post.
I should add that my file is on a specific link address, not something off of the main Washington Post web pages. I m open to sharing a “look-see” at what my Comments look like on the site. I have no idea at this point if it’s an HTML system on the Washington Post. I’ve looked at the “code” in the console, F12 in Firefox and it EDGE, but it didn’t do me much good.
wget utiltiy? That’s a new one to me, I’ll see if I can find something on it or do you have a link that describes it?
I just went onto the Washington Post web page for my comments and looked at the code. It begins and ends with the opening and closing amd and then it’s loads of java. I would have copied some of it to post but I could not get it to high lite and copy???
Anyway, I’ve found several web pages on wget utility so I can read up on it and see if I understand any of it.
@RetiredGuy This is going to be a tough task. I have looked at the HTML from an article (not behind the paywall) and I saw that the comments are not part of it. Instead, they are loaded later via JavaScript (Not Java!) queries, so they won’t be visible in an offline version as obtained by wget. I really don’t see how you can get around clicking the More or View More buttons.
However, I found the page to be perfectly visible and stable in FireFox (I don’t have Egde). Once you’ve got the full conversation, you can do the following (I tried and it works): Right-Click somewhere on the conversation and select This frame>Save As and save it as, say talk.html which gives you a tidy offline version of the conversation alone (without the article and the ads) which can be opened in the browser (for copy and paste) or directly in the word processor of your choice, e.g. LibreOffice.
That is a disappointment, but so has been the Washington Post ignoring me these many months.
If only there was some sort of code that could run in the console to mouse click the words More and See More, that would save my right hand from the arthritis. But, what the heck, I’ll have to go for it to get what I’m still missing.
I had a sort of wild hair question pop in my foggy brain. In the Lifewire pages on w get it says on page 1 that this can be used to download a web page. Can this be extended to have a continuous page download that would have a look for and mouse click on More and See More, then the down load, then the look for More and See More and then the download Until the EOF?
I know, wild hair, but I’m not a programmer, except self taught in the old html 30 years plus ago.
Never mind. I did get w get and found how o use it in a simple operation. I got the front page of the my old comments, but no data. the news web page has my comments somewhere in their code, but I can’t even begin to locate it from the huge amount of html and java they have there.
I’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way to get down to the data I want to grab.
But thanks for telling me about w get. It was a great learning experience to learn about using it.