I am building a site. Part of this site is a python script triggered by the user in the UI, which runs on the server. It produces HTML files. I have been reading the html with the node server and then sending the files in their entirety to the client to render as a document. These HTML files follow a standard format, the only thing changing is the data in the tables displayed. 

This is obviously inefficient, as I'm sending a ton of HTML that doesn't need to be sent. I really just need to send an object with some data in it. I've created a view that is rendered, and then that page sends an Ajax request for the rest of the information.

**Question:**
I'd like to parse the HTML files server side, extract the information from the HTML itself, and then use that to build an object to send off. Can I create a document object within the node environment? Is there anything that will read and understand the HTML so that I can parse through it quickly, similar to jQuery? Or can I simply load up jQuery within node, and if so, how?

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For various reasons I cannot (or simply don't want to) change the output format of the script, I would like to build this python >> html >> node >> client pipeline.