retrieve text from a webpage

[Techno]

is it possible to retrieve text on a guestbook on a website?

if so how? I am trying to figure out how to read the website guestbook in asp.net so i can extract the stuff i need from it.

[Magiaus]

you could loop through it getting each control/element on either client or server side and get each control/elements .innerText

[Magiaus]

p.s. if you do it server side the page has a form control the form control has all the .net controls within it

[Techno]

thanks

actually its probably my fault, should have been in the C# forum. but still, how would you tell the page/app to go to a website, read the entire site (text) or whatever in some sort of stream and then i can do whatever i want with it...?

[Magiaus]

I would Setup a web app with a frame page with three frames. top frame address bar for going to the site, middle frame the site to pull text from and the bottom frame contains js to read what is in the middle frame and display it in a textbox.

document.frames["middle_frame"].document.Body.innerText you can also loop through the arrays of elements by name ie document.anchors or document.images or whatever.

that frames[name].document..... may or may not need the document I don't remember right now for certian

btw yes frames are evil and if a site nows how break out of frames like for instance msdn.microsoft.com it won't work.....

the other option would be to use something like this below and the parse the text from the html

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
class ClientGET {
    private static bool bShow;

    public static void Main(string[] args) {

        if (args.Length < 1) {
            showusage();
        } else {
            if (args.Length == 2)
                bShow = false;
            else
                bShow = true;

            getPage(args[0]);
        }

        Console.WriteLine();
        Console.WriteLine("Press Enter to continue...");
        Console.ReadLine();

        return;
    }

    public static void showusage() {
        Console.WriteLine("Attempts to GET a URL");
        Console.WriteLine("\r\nUsage:");
        Console.WriteLine("ClientGET URL");
        Console.WriteLine("Examples:");
        Console.WriteLine("ClientGET http://www.microsoft.com/net/");
    }


    public static void getPage(String url) {
        WebResponse result = null;

        try {
            WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(url);
            result = req.GetResponse();
            Stream ReceiveStream = result.GetResponseStream();
            Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader( ReceiveStream, encode );
            Console.WriteLine("\r\nResponse stream received");
            if (bShow) {
                Char[] read = new Char[256];
                int count = sr.Read( read, 0, 256 );

                Console.WriteLine("HTML...\r\n");
                while (count > 0) {
                    String str = new String(read, 0, count);
                    Console.Write(str);
                    count = sr.Read(read, 0, 256);
                }
                Console.WriteLine("");
            }
        } catch(Exception) {
            Console.WriteLine("\r\nThe request URI could not be found or was malformed");
        } finally {
            if ( result != null ) {
                result.Close();
            }
        }
    }
} 

that is from the quickstarts and will need to be tweaked to even think about working

[Magiaus]

you may want to try search on planetsourcecode.com I saw somethings on the that may do what your wanting or be a good start. Just remember if it is a server page it has to run before you try to read it or it won't be as it should that's why I would go with the web app....

document.frames[name].document.location.href = new url in case you don't know