VB6: Load Website / Retrieve data

[John0111]

Hello Everybody,

I am sure somebody would be able to help me, I will be forever in your debt :)

Here is the scenario, I have a website and say for this sake it is a profile database basically.

Right, I want Visual Basic to load say, my profile on the website so I put

http://www.<url>.com/search_profile.php=John011

It retreives the data and puts it on the webpage. The information retreived will display something like (in plain format (no fancy graphics on the page just plain text))

Firstname: John
Location: Home :P

What I basically want to do is put the profile name in Visual Basic, it loads the page in the background and saves that data to a text file on my computer for the profile I have searched.

I want to be able to search for a profile I put in, and it appends a file with any other profile which I might put in.

Thank you for you wisdom ! :)

[danp129]

What have you written so far?

[John0111]

Ok, at the moment what I really need is just to load the page in the background of VB and then store that web page to a text file with the results.

[danp129]

Option Explicit
Private Sub Command1_Click()
    Dim sHTML
    sHTML = RequestText("http://news.google.com")
 
    WriteToFile "c:\test.html", sHTML
 
    Debug.Print sHTML
End Sub
 
Private Function RequestText(sURL, Optional sMethod = "POST")
    'You may have caching issues using GET
    Dim XMLHTTP
    Set XMLHTTP = CreateObject("microsoft.XMLHTTP")
    sMethod = UCase(sMethod)
    XMLHTTP.Open sMethod, sURL, False
    XMLHTTP.send (Null) '"x=x"
    RequestText = XMLHTTP.responseText
    Set XMLHTTP = Nothing
End Function
 
Private Sub WriteToFile(sPath, sText)
    Dim frfile As Long
 
    'open the text file to be written to
    frfile = FreeFile()
    Open sPath For Output Access Write As #frfile
 
    Print #frfile, sText
 
    Close #frfile
End Sub
 
 

I usually do something like this unless there's a script that has to be run in javascript that writes the data I need to get after the document loads, in which case I use IE or a web browser control and read the innerhtml.