[2005] get value from a page, how?

[VBlee]

hello.

i have made a converter which is really simple, you can put in a value you want to convert and what the current value of say the £ to the $ is and it will work out, i would like to know how its possible to get a value from a webpage.

i would like to find out how to get a value from http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/currency-converter you see there is a table which displays the values in the table, my question is how do i get those values from the internet to my application?, is this possible?

if you know where a good example/tutorial is or can give an example that would be great

thanks
lee

[penguin5000]

Have a look at:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vbasic/ms789065.aspx

Microsoft have a tutorial entitled, "Interacting With Web Sites in Code" - which looks as though its pretty much what you need.

[Shardox]

Hello VBlee,
I had to do something similar but with EUR-USD, and after experimenting with yahoo financial website I found a way to get the EUR-USD directly in a txt file. I have changed EUR into GBP and ...guess what? It worked!

Here is the code:

        If My.Computer.Network.IsAvailable Then
            Try
                ' Download file from internet
                My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile( _
                "http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=GBPUSD=X&f=sl1&e=txt", _
                "quotes.txt", String.Empty, String.Empty, False, 10000, True)
                ' Read file and get the value
                Dim st As String = System.IO.File.ReadAllText("quotes.txt").Trim
                Dim value As String
                value = Strings.Right(st, st.Length - st.IndexOf(",") - 1)
                MsgBox(value)
            Catch ex As Exception
                ' Timeout
                MessageBox.Show("Time to get value from internet exceeded", "TIMEOUT")
            End Try
        Else
            'Network is not available
            Messagebox.show("Network is not available","Network Error")
        End If

Notes:
I have set timeout to 10000 miliseconds (10 secs).
You can change the extension of the downloaded file to another one by changing the last 3 characters of the URL.
To get other rates just change the 6 characters after s=
Examples: EURUSD,USDEUR,GBPEUR,EURGBP,USDGBP...

[VBlee]

thank you all very much i will have a look at this code and try to work something out

[Shardox]

I wrote GPB instead of GBP (Great Britain Pound, I guess). I have corrected it over my first post.