Is there a way to retrieve some text from a webpage to a textbox in VB? - vb.net

Question

I'm trying to make it so I can have several text boxes in my form show pieces of information from a specific webpage. For example, would there be a way I would be able to retrieve the title of this question to a variable with the click of a button in Visual Basic?

Answer 1

It not hard but you have to look at the source page, and identify the elements.
In nicely formed pages, usually the div elements have a tag ID, but often they don't, so you have to grab say by a attribute name - often you can use the class name of the div in question.
So, to grab the Title, and you question text of this post?
This works:
Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim xDoc As New Xml.XmlDocument
Dim strURL As String = "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55753982"
Dim xWeb As New WebBrowser
xWeb.ScriptErrorsSuppressed = True
xWeb.Navigate(strURL)
Do Until xWeb.ReadyState = WebBrowserReadyState.Complete
Application.DoEvents()
Loop
Dim HDoc As HtmlDocument = xWeb.Document
Debug.Print(HDoc.GetElementById("question-header").FirstChild.InnerText)
Debug.Print(FindClass(HDoc, "post-text"))
End Sub
Function FindClass(Hdoc As HtmlDocument, strClass As String) As String
' get all Divs, and search by class name
Dim OneElement As HtmlElement
For Each OneElement In Hdoc.GetElementsByTagName("div")
If OneElement.GetAttribute("classname") = strClass Then
Return OneElement.InnerText
End If
Next
' we get here, not found, so return a empty stirng
Return "not found"
End Function
OutPut:
(first part is title question)
Is there a way to retrieve some text from a webpage to a textbox in VB?
(second part is question text)
I'm trying to make it so I can have several text boxes in my form show pieces of
information from a specific webpage. For example, would there be a way I would be
able to retrieve the title of this question to a variable with the click of a button
in Visual Basic?