When you are working on a project to get data from a webpage but you don’t have access to the back-end database or a API to get any values out.<\/p>\n
The workaround I use until something changes is Web scraping.<\/p>\n
I have a project with this problem – it’s another VB.NET one.<\/p>\n
My Scraping code goes along like this –<\/p>\n
\r\n'Get the URL \/ Navigate a browser window too it (this is hidden in my project\r\nWebBrowser.Navigate("http:\/\/website.com\/pageiwanttoscrape.aspx")\r\n\r\n'Convert the HTML of the page to a string using the body.outerhtml function\r\nwebPage1 = WebBrowser.Document.Body.OuterHtml\r\n\r\n'Use the InString function to search for a term in the webPage1 string\r\nIf InStr(webPage1, "term to search") <> 0 Then\r\n'get the position of the term to search\r\n StringSearch = InStr(webPage1, "term to search")\r\n'pick some deatails out of the page using the position + x and capture the next n letters\r\n ScrapedText = Mid(webPage1, StringSearch + x, n)\r\n'tidy up anything we don't like out of the returned string \r\n ScrapedText = ScrapedText.Replace(".", "")\r\n'now we have the scraped text we can use it in our app\r\n \r\n\r\n End If\r\n<\/pre>\nTa-da – workaround using scraping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you are working on a project to get data from a webpage but you don’t have access to the back-end database or a API to get any values out. The workaround I use until something changes is Web scraping. I have a project with this problem – it’s another VB.NET one. My Scraping code … Continue reading Scraping webpages and displaying data from it…<\/span>