Extracting text from a web page <Resolved>

[David RH]

Hello

I have an app that uses text on a web page to guide the populating of a database. The company just changed that format of the page so now the old code no longer works. The old format had the information in a more compact form that had the basic layout intact and was easily parsed. The new format uses a lot more html code to make it more "robust". But in the process it's got a lot more clutter and the basic layout is gone when I extract the source.

So my question is this, before I write a bunch of code to resurrect the layout and remove all the clutter, is there a way in VB to extract text from a web page with the layout intact or at least without all the excess html code.

What I use now is:

Dim hElm As IHTMLElement
Dim intStart As Integer, intEnd As Integer, TheLength As Integer

Set hElm = brwWebBrowser.Document.All.tags("html").Item(0)
txtWebPagePull = hElm.innerHTML

This code is in the back end of a webbrowser control that the user navigates to the appropriate page and then runs to extract the text.

Thanks

David

[MikeJoel]

WebBrowser1.Document.body.innerhtml
Will give you the page's html.

WebBrowser1.Document.body.innerText
Will give the text only.

I don't know what you mean by "layout". The html controls the layout. So basically you can't just grab text and expect it to remain in table layout and such since the HTML controls the tables.

If it is in frames then you will need to access the frame you want the text from.
WebBrowser1.Document.frames(FRAME_INDEX).Document.body.innertext

Mike

[David RH]

WebBrowser1.Document.body.innerText
Will give the text only.

I don't know what you mean by "layout". The html controls the layout. So basically you can't just grab text and expect it to remain in table layout and such since the HTML controls the tables.

Mike

Thanks Mike

That was what I was looking for.

By layout I mean the spacing and alignment of the characters. True some of the layout is a little off but I can work with that. It's odd that on most lines that the layout is preserved perfectly and others not so well.

These are schedules for the month and the app extracts the schedule and helps me and my fellow employees track our pay. Not that we don't trust the man but they just don't seem to have a good grasp of basic math skills when it comes to calculating our pay. Really odd how the mistakes only seem to go one way.

David

[leinad31]

Unless the HTML elements have names or ids then you'll have to know the DMO structure and navigate the hierarchy accordingly.