Simple GET request

Problem

You want to make a simple GET request to a web site and extract useful information.

Solution

Use the HTTP Request node to make an HTTP request and an HTML node to extract elements from the retrieved html document.

Example

Flow JSON

[{"id":"d88dd470.0ac7b8","type":"inject","z":"18c99b30.cf9d35","name":"make request","topic":"","payload":"","payloadType":"date","repeat":"","crontab":"","once":false,"x":130,"y":180,"wires":[["874a3d4e.9b666"]]},{"id":"874a3d4e.9b666","type":"http request","z":"18c99b30.cf9d35","name":"","method":"GET","ret":"txt","url":"https://nodered.org","tls":"","x":294.5,"y":180,"wires":[["90243cc1.87edc"]]},{"id":"7403c68f.21d7c8","type":"debug","z":"18c99b30.cf9d35","name":"","active":true,"console":"false","complete":"false","x":650,"y":180,"wires":[]},{"id":"90243cc1.87edc","type":"html","z":"18c99b30.cf9d35","name":"","property":"","tag":".Ignite-latest-version","ret":"text","as":"single","x":471.5,"y":180,"wires":[["7403c68f.21d7c8"]]}]

Discussion

To find content in a web page, the Chrome browser’s ‘Inspect Element’ can be a useful tool. Using the browser, right click on a page element to see the tags, ids and classes applied to an element as shown.

In this example we retrieve the latest version of Ignite from https://nodered.org. Using the inspector we can see the version is located in a <span> tag with the class Ignite-latest-version.

The HTML node can be configured with the CSS selector .Ignite-latest-version to return a message for each matching element.