Browserify support

[sindresorhus]

It would be useful if Cheerio could be browserified (or even better, offered an official browserified build). I need it for Titanium, but it could also be useful in Web Workers and any other non-browser/node JS platform. Seeing as Cheerio is mostly a string manipulations library it should be possible.

I had to do a few changes to Cheerio to get it running (i used brfs to inline the two fs calls), but I'm having issues with it not persisting any of the changes.

Testcase (gist) (open console)

^ It doesn't change the text.

[fb55]

Okay, we've got multiple problems:

First of all, I opened fb55/entities#12, which will cover the entity support.

Next, cheerio should, as discussed before, remove the wrapper around CSSselect. There is no reason to keep it, and it causes problems in this case.

Finally, the API import is still problematic; it should probably be changed in cheerio. (It would be awesome if browserify would support ['mod1', 'mod2', 'mod3'].map(require) chains, so we could remove at least a bit of the overhead.)

As far as the functionality is concerned: I recently played with using CSSselect for querying the browser DOM, and left the replacement in the package.json. As a result, it found no elements. This is fixed now; I'll publish a new version soon, which will contain the fix.

FYI, you can load your browserified cheerio version in jsconsole, which is much better for playing with it :)

[matthewmueller]

@sindresorhus the web workers is a good point.

My personal preference for package managers is to use component, which I believe is compatible with browserify using a repository field in the component.json, so I think we should start from there.

[sindresorhus]

Next, cheerio should, as discussed before, remove the wrapper around CSSselect. There is no reason to keep it, and it causes problems in this case.

@matthewmueller any reason to keep it around?

Finally, the API import is still problematic; it should probably be changed in cheerio. (It would be awesome if browserify would support ['mod1', 'mod2', 'mod3'].map(require) chains, so we could remove at least a bit of the overhead.)

Shouldn't be too bad manually requiring them for now.

FYI, you can load your browserified cheerio version in jsconsole, which is much better for playing with it :)

Nice, didn't know about that one :)

[fb55]

entities shouldn't be a problem anymore. The CSSselect wrapper was removed. Now, only cheerio's require statements have to be fixed to resolve this issue.