Download a text file from a url in VBA - vba

Question

I need to do a one time download of a pipe deliminated text file in VBA. I have tried many of the solutions in other stack overflow questions but I can't seem to make any of the solutions work. It's from the internal wiki page of my firm.
The file is something like: https://wiki.somecompany/downloads/attachments/data.txt
Note: that is not a real url
Edit: I am working within excel.
I am extremely new to VBA, so the solutions I read will probably work but they were not idiot proof.
I tried many things, but the most promising looking were the solutions posted here: EXCEL VBA - To open a text file from a website
I stopped working with the first one because it seemed like you needed Mozilla for that one, and I did not know how to specify Chrome.
I messed around with the open workbook option, but I kept getting a compile error that said "Expected: =" but I don't know what the problem is or where it should be.
Edited: #Tim Williams - your solution is the closest to have anything at all happen besides just VBA errors. I got as far as turning my spreadsheet into a log in page, so I guess I need to pass a username and password somehow

Answer 1

You should be able to turn on the Macro Recorder and get what you want pretty quickly. In fact, you probably spent 10x more time describing the scenario, then it would take to record the code you need. Although, it is possible that you actually can't import the data using the Macro Recorder. You should still be able to import the data by referencing a CSV, which I believe is the exact same thing as a Text file.
Sub Import_CSV_File_From_URL()
Dim URL As String
Dim destCell As Range
URL = "http://www.test.com/test.csv"
Set destCell = Worksheets("test").Range("A1")
With destCell.Parent.QueryTables.Add(Connection:="TEXT;" & URL, Destination:=destCell)
.TextFileStartRow = 1
.TextFileParseType = xlDelimited
.TextFileCommaDelimiter = True
.Refresh BackgroundQuery:=False
End With
destCell.Parent.QueryTables(1).Delete
End Sub
If that doesn't work for you, simply download the file, and do the import from your hard-drive.
Private Declare Function URLDownloadToFile Lib "urlmon" Alias _
"URLDownloadToFileA" (ByVal pCaller As Long, ByVal szURL As String, ByVal _
szFileName As String, ByVal dwReserved As Long, ByVal lpfnCB As Long) As Long
Sub DownloadFilefromWeb()
Dim strSavePath As String
Dim URL As String, ext As String
Dim buf, ret As Long
URL = Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A2").Value
buf = Split(URL, ".")
ext = buf(UBound(buf))
strSavePath = "C:\Users\rshuell\Desktop\Downloads\" & "DownloadedFile." & ext
ret = URLDownloadToFile(0, URL, strSavePath, 0, 0)
If ret = 0 Then
MsgBox "Download has been succeed!"
Else
MsgBox "Error"
End If
End Sub