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JavaScript Exception in HtmlUnit when clicking at google result page

I want to use HtmlUnit (v2.21) to get some search result pages from google. This requires me to click on "people also looked for" link when searching for a person (right side, see example link), which triggers some JavaScript and changes the content of the current page. But this gives me an JavaScript Wrapper Exception (see below).
Clickable example link: https://www.google.de/search?ie=UTF-8&safe=off&q=nicki+minaj
Simple TestCase with errors:
String url = "https://www.google.de/search?ie=UTF-8&safe=off&q=nicki+minaj";
WebClient client = new WebClient(BrowserVersion.BEST_SUPPORTED);
HtmlPage page = client.getPage(url);
HtmlElement link = page.getFirstByXPath("//a[#class='_Zjg']");
HtmlPage newPage = link.click(); //throws exception
this.storeResultFile(newPage.asXml(), "test");
client.close();
Result:
net.sourceforge.htmlunit.corejs.javascript.WrappedException: Wrapped java.lang.NullPointerException
at net.sourceforge.htmlunit.corejs.javascript.Context.throwAsScriptRuntimeEx(Context.java:2053)
at com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.JavaScriptEngine.doProcessPostponedActions(JavaScriptEngine.java:947)
at com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.JavaScriptEngine.processPostponedActions(JavaScriptEngine.java:1012)
at com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.html.DomElement.click(DomElement.java:799)
at com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.html.DomElement.click(DomElement.java:742)
at com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.html.DomElement.click(DomElement.java:689)
I stored the xml of the "page" object and made sure that the XPath expression is valid and has results.
Anybody got any ideas?

Looks like the JavaScript-Engine (based on Rhino) is very easy to upset and quits on some script-issues, where other browsers are still able to run the script.
I dont know if there is a mistake in the scripts from google, but these two lines solved it for me:
JavaScriptEngine engine = client.getJavaScriptEngine();
engine.holdPosponedActions();
Nevertheless, when running multiple htmlunit-objects in multiple threads it is still possible to get accross this error. This is more a workaround than a solution.

I am getting un-terminated string literal for my userextension.js file in Selenium IDE

I've the following code to add in userextensions.js file whenever I add the following piece of code it gives me following error
Failed to load user-extensions.js: Syntax Error: Unterminated String Literal
Selenium.prototype.doInsertCKEditor = function(locator,word)
{
this.doWaitForCondition("var x =
Selenium.browserbot.findElementOrNull('//td[#id=\"cke_contents_form
\"]');x != null;", "50000");
this.doRunScript("CKEDITOR.instances['"+locator+"'].setData('"+word
+"');");

the best way to remove this ever I found it to open your script in some javascript editor I did it in Adobe Dreamweaver and it pin pointed the line where actually the problem is and I resolved this

how to receive XML in IE8 with mootools

I'm doing a web where I heavily use AJAX requests to
a XML service. In fact, my web is a front-end with almost
no server whatsoever and uses AJAX to communicate with
the back-end.
Everything was going fine (I developed and tested in Ubuntu 9.04
and Firefox 3.0 as a browser).
One day I decided to see how my web did in IE8...
horror!
Nothing was working as it marvelously did in Firefox.
To be more specific, the Request.HTML's were not working.
As I said, my web relied heavily on that, so nothing worked.
I spent a day trying to get something running but I had no luck..
The only conclusion to which I arrived was that the XML was
incorrectly parsed
(I hope I'm in mistake). Let's get to the code:
var req = new Request.HTML({
url: 'service/Catalog.groovy',
onSuccess: function(responseTree, responseElements) {
var catz = responseElements.filter('category');
catz.each(function(cat){
// cat = $(cat);
var cat_id = cat.get('id');
var subcategory = cat.getElement('subcategory');
alert(cat_id);
alert(cat.get('html'));
alert(subcategory.get('html'));
}
},
onFailure: function(){...}
});
for example, that piece of code.
In firefox, it worked perfectly. It alerted an ID (for example, 7),
then it showed the contents of the category element, for example:
<subcategory id='1'>
<category_id>7</category_id>
<code>ACTIO</code>
<name>Action</name>
</subcategory>
and then it showed the contents of some inner element, in this case:
<category_id>7</category_id>
<code>ACTIO</code>
<name>Action</name>
In IE8, the first alert worked OK (alerted 7)
but the next alert (alert(cat.get('html'));) gave an empty string
and the last threw an Exception... it said something about subcategory
beeing null.
What I concluded with this all is that the elements where parsed
correctly
in Firefox, but in IE8 I only got the tags and the attributes OK,
everything else
was completely wrong (in fact, missing). I mean, the inner content of
all the
elements of the response where gone!
Other fact you could use: this code:
alert(cat.get('tag')); resulted in
Firefox: category
IE8: /category <-----------(?)
hmm what else...
oh yeah... the line you see commented above (cat = $(cat);) was
something
I tried to do to fix this. I read in the mootools Docs that IE needed
to explicitly call
the $ function on elements to get all the Element-magic ... but this
didn't fix anything.
I was so desperate... I even fiddled around with mootools.js code
OK, so...
What I want you, dear mootool-pro's is to help me solve this problem,
for I REALLY need the web to function in IE8, and in fact I chose
mootools to forget about compatibility problems...
ps: if something is not clear, please ASK! I'd appreciate any help :D

I had a similar issue like this sometime ago using jQuery. The problem was that, in IE, the incoming response data needed to be handled by the Microsoft.XMLDOM ActiveX object.
The general steps are to:
Instantiate the ActiveX object.
var oXmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
Pass it the incoming response data and load it.
oXmlDoc.loadXML(sXmlResponseData);
Parse it as needed.
You can check out the full resolution here.

Catch Javascript syntax errors while using YUI3

I'm using slightly modified sample code provided by the YUI team. When my source responds with something other than JSON (or just has a JSON syntax error) my browser (Safari) aborts script processing, preventing me from notifying the user there was a problem.
I'm definitely no JS guru, so this code may be a lot uglier than it has to be. The code is, roughly:
YUI().use("dump", "node", "datasource-get", "datasource-jsonschema", function(Y) {
var myDataSource = new Y.DataSource.Get({
source:"/some/json/source/?"}),
myCallback = {
success: function(e){
myResponse = e.response;
doSomething(myDataSource);
},
failure: function(e){
Y.get("#errors").setContent("<li>Could not retrieve data: " + e.error.message + "</li>");
}
};
myDataSource.plug(Y.Plugin.DataSourceJSONSchema, {
schema: {
resultListLocator: "blah.list",
resultFields: ["user", "nickname"]
}
});
myDataSource.sendRequest("foo=bar", myCallback);
}
I've tried wrapping the "var myDataSource" block in a try/catch, and I've also tried wrapping the whole YUI().use() block.
Is it possible to catch syntax errors? Do I have to replace the all-in-one DataSource.Get call with separate IO and parse calls?

Since you are requesting a local script, you can use Y.io + Y.JSON.parse inside a try/catch or Y.DataSource.IO + Y.DataSchema.JSON (+ Y.JSON).
The benefit of DataSource.Get is that it avoids the Same Origin Policy. However, it is less secure and less flexible. If it is not necessary, you should avoid using it.
The contract of DataSource.Get is that the server supports JSONP. The way this works is that Get adds a script node to the page with a src=(the url you provided)&callback=someDataSourceFunction.
The browser will request the resource at that url and one of two things will happen:
the server will respond with a JavaScript string in the form of someDataSourceFunction({"all":"your data"}); or
the server will return some text that can't be parsed as JavaScript.
In either event, that string is treated as the contents of a script node--it is parsed and executed. If it cannot be parsed, the browser will throw an error. There's no stopping this. While JSONP is technically not under the spec constraints of true JSON (even invalid JSON should parse and execute), you should always use pure JSON, and always use a server side lib to generate the JSON output (look on http://json.org for a list of libs in every conceivable language). Don't hand-roll JSON. It only leads to hours of debugging.

The problem is probably that the error happens at some level in the browser (Javascript parsing) before YUI even gets the occasion to report a failure.
It is notoriously hard to catch this kind of error in Safari, which does not implement window.onerror. In order to catch more errors with my Javascript library, bezen.org, I added try/catch in places where asynchronous code is triggered:
dynamic script loading (equivalent to your JSON download)
setTimeout/setTimer: I wrapped and replaced these browser functions to insert a try/catch which logs errors
You may be interested in having a look at the source code of the corresponding modules, which may be useful to you as is or as hints for the resolution of your problem:
bezen.dom.js Look for safelistener in appendScript method
bezen.error.js Check safeSetTimeout/safeSetInterval and catchError

Maybe try this before you "doSomething":
try
{
var test = YAHOO.lang.JSON.parse(jsonString);
...
}
catch (e)
{
alert('invalid json');
}

jQuery .getJSON Firefox 3 Syntax Error Undefined

I'm getting a syntax error (undefined line 1 test.js) in Firefox 3 when I run this code. The alert works properly (it displays 'work') but I have no idea why I am receiving the syntax error.
jQuery code:
$.getJSON("json/test.js", function(data) {
alert(data[0].test);
});
test.js:
[{"test": "work"}]
Any ideas? I'm working on this for a larger .js file but I've narrowed it down to this code. What's crazy is if I replace the local file with a remote path there is no syntax error (here's an example):
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cat&tagmode=any&format=json&jsoncallback=?

I found a solution to kick that error
$.ajaxSetup({'beforeSend': function(xhr){
if (xhr.overrideMimeType)
xhr.overrideMimeType("text/plain");
}
});
Now the explanation:
In firefox 3 (and I asume only firefox THREE) every file that has the mime-type of "text/xml" is parsed and syntax-checked. If you start your JSON with an "[" it will raise an Syntax Error, if it starts with "{" it's an "Malformed Error" (my translation for "nicht wohlgeformt").
If I access my json-file from an local script - no server is included in this progress - I have to override the mime-type... Maybe you set your MIME-Type for that very file wrong...
How ever, adding this little piece of code will save you from an error-message
Edit: In jquery 1.5.1 or higher, you can use the mimeType option to achieve the same effect. To set it as a default for all requests, use
$.ajaxSetup({ mimeType: "text/plain" });
You can also use it with $.ajax directly, i.e., your calls translates to
$.ajax({
url: "json/test.js",
dataType: "json",
mimeType: "textPlain",
success: function(data){
alert(data[0].test);
} });

getJSON may be insisting on at least one name:value pair.
A straight array ["item0","item1","Item2"] is valid JSON, but there's nothing to reference it with in the callback function for getJSON.
In this little array of Zip codes:
{"result":[["43001","ALEXANDRIA"],["43002","AMLIN"],["43003","ASHLEY"],["43004","BLACKLICK"],["43005","BLADENSBURG"],["43006","BRINKHAVEN"]]}
... I was stuck until I added the {"result": tag. Afterward I could reference it:
<script>
$.getJSON("temp_test_json.php","",
function(data) {
$.each(data.result, function(i, item) {
alert(item[0]+ " " + i);
if (i > 4 ) return false;
});
});
</script>
... I also found it was just easier to use $.each().

This may sound really really dumb, but change the file extension for test.js from .js to .txt. I had the same thing happen with perfectly valid JSON data files with pretty well any extension except .txt (example: .json, .i18n). Since I've changed the extension, I get the data and use it just fine.
Like I said, it may sound dumb but it worked for me.

HI
I have this same error when testing the web page on my local PC, but once it is up on the hosting server the error no longer happens. Sorry - I have no idea of the reason, but thought it may help someone else track down the reason

Try renaming "test.js" to "test.json", which is what Wikipedia says is the official extension for JSON files. Maybe it's being processed as Javascript at some point.

Have you tried disabling all the Firefox extensions?
I usually get some errors in the Firebug console that are caused by the extensions, not by the webs being visited.

Check if there's ; at the end of the test.js. jQuery executes eval("(" + data + ")") and semicolon would prevent Firefox from finding closing parenthesis. And there might be some other unseen characters that prevents it from doing so.
I can tell you why this remote location working though, it's because it's executed in completely different manner. Since it has jsoncallback=? as the part of query parameters, jQuery thinks of it as of JSONP and actually inserts it into the DOM inside <script> tags. Try use "json/test.js?callback=?" as target, it might help too.

What kind of webserver are you running that on? I once had an issue reading a JSON file on IIS because it wasn't defined as a valid MIME type.

Try configuring the content type of the .js file. Firefox expects it to be text/plain, apparently. You can do that as Peter Hoffmann does above, or you can set the content type header server side.
This might mean a server-side configuration change (like apache's mime.types file), or if the json is served from a script, setting the content-type header in the script.
Or at least that seems to have made the error go away for me.

I had a similar problem but was looping through a for loop. I think the problem might be that the index is out of bound.
Kien

For the people who don't use jQuery, you need to call the overrideMimeType method before sending the request:
var r = new XMLHttpRequest();
r.open("GET", filepath, true);
r.overrideMimeType("text/plain");