What is xhr capture?
XHR capture watches the requests a page makes while it renders and returns the responses whose URL matches a pattern you supply — a substring, a wildcard, or a regular expression. Where a site renders from its own JSON API, that JSON is available directly rather than reconstructed from the DOM.
Why it matters
The data behind a page is usually cleaner, more complete and more stable than the markup built from it. It also costs no model call, and it survives redesigns that would break any selector-based read of the same screen.