Get String From Webpage

[Tddupre]

I am trying to get several strings from a web page and add them to a listbox

each string I need to grab falls in between these two strings

<a rel='lightbox' href='

And

'>Image Only</a></td>

there will be several of these strings on the same page

I am pretty sure I can use string splits to do this but could use a little help to figure it out

[kleinma]

In a webbrowser control or you just want to download the string behind the scenes and get the data? What version of Visual Studio?

[Tddupre]

In a webbrowser control or you just want to download the string behind the scenes and get the data? What version of Visual Studio?

just behind the scenes, 2010 .net framework 2

[kleinma]

you are using VS2010 but targetting .NET 2.0?

[Tddupre]

you are using VS2010 but targetting .NET 2.0?

yea im just using 2.0 since it has everything that i need for this

[kleinma]

Your best bet then would be regular expressions. You could manually parse out the data however that would be a much more complex cumbersome approach.

If you were using a newer version of the framework, then sometimes you can make use of things like XML literals where you can load a webpage into an XML document (if the webpage is infact well formed) and query data directly from that. Even if its not well formed (ie no root element) you can usually grab part of the text and load it as an XML fragment and still query/parse it easily.

Or if you were using a browser control, you could make use of the DOM objects the .NET framework exposes to parse the data.

Since you are just using .NET 2.0 and want to do it behind the scenes, try doing a search on here for regex and maybe a few other keywords like webpage, because there have been quite a few examples of this on here.

[Tddupre]

what would be the regex expression be? I've been looking and can not figure out exactly what it would be

[Tddupre]

ok here is my code

Dim objRegEx As System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex
        Dim objMatch As System.Text.RegularExpressions.Match
        Dim arrLinks As New System.Collections.ArrayList()
        ' Create regular expression
        objRegEx = New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex( _
            "(?<=<a rel='lightbox' href=).*(?=>Image Only</a></td>)", _
            System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexOptions.IgnoreCase Or _
            System.Text.RegularExpressions.RegexOptions.Compiled)
        ' Match expression to HTML
        objMatch = objRegEx.Match(HTML)
        ' Loop through matches and add <1> to ArrayList
        While objMatch.Success
            Dim strMatch As String
            strMatch = objMatch.Groups(1).ToString
            ListBox1.Items.Add(strMatch)
            objMatch = objMatch.NextMatch()
        End While

but it is just adding blank lines to the listbox and not the strings it found