Is it possible to use Cheerio in the browser?

No, Cheerio is not designed to run in the browser. Cheerio is a server-side library that is intended to be used with Node.js. It provides an API similar to jQuery for traversing and manipulating the structure of HTML documents, which is particularly useful for web scraping and server-side DOM manipulation.

The reason Cheerio cannot be used in the browser is because it relies on the htmlparser2 library, which is a server-side HTML parser that does not work in the browser environment. Additionally, Cheerio is designed to mimic the jQuery API for a server-side environment and does not include all the features that would be required to interact with a live DOM in the browser like event handling or AJAX.

If you need to manipulate the DOM or scrape content in the browser, you should use jQuery or vanilla JavaScript. Here's an example of how you could perform a simple DOM manipulation using vanilla JavaScript in the browser:

// Find an element with the ID 'example'
const element = document.getElementById('example');

// Change its text content
element.textContent = 'New text content!';

Or, if you prefer the jQuery-like syntax and you are in a browser that supports it, you can include jQuery:

<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.6.0.min.js"></script>
<script>
  // Using jQuery to change the text of the element with the ID 'example'
  $('#example').text('New text content with jQuery!');
</script>

For web scraping in the browser, you would typically use the fetch API or XMLHttpRequest to retrieve the content and then parse it using the DOMParser API, or manipulate it directly using jQuery if it's already included in your project.

Here's an example using fetch and DOMParser:

fetch('https://example.com')
  .then(response => response.text())
  .then(html => {
    const parser = new DOMParser();
    const doc = parser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html');

    // Now you can manipulate `doc` like a normal DOM object
    const heading = doc.querySelector('h1').textContent;
    console.log(heading);
  })
  .catch(error => {
    console.error('Error:', error);
  });

Remember that web scraping in the browser is subject to the same-origin policy, so you may encounter restrictions when trying to scrape content from domains other than the one your script is running on. You would need to use a CORS proxy or have the appropriate CORS headers set by the server to bypass these restrictions.