Retrieving information from the web and displaying in your
own format is relatively easy with VB6's Internet Transfer object. Whether
the target web document is a web page, text file, word doc or whatever,
simply passing the URL of the file, is all that's required to pull back
the entire file. The code below, shows an example of retrieving a web page
and saving it as a text file: Dim strURL As String
Dim bytData() As Byte
Dim intFile As Integer
Dim dblShell As Double
strURL = "http://www.pbdr.com/index.html"
intFile = FreeFile()
bytData() = netTransfer.OpenURL(strURL, icByteArray)
Open "c:\temp\webpage.txt" For Binary Access Write As #intFile
Put #intFile, , bytData()
Close #intFile
dblShell = Shell("notepad c:\temp\webpage.txt")
In this example, a web page is identified and retrieved into a byte
array using the Internet Transfer object, netTransfer. A byte array is
used here because the target file can can download irrespective of it's
type, be it an exe, doc, xls, rtf, htm, zip or txt. Here, the array holds the
individual ascii values for each character in the web page source code. For ease of reading, the array is then converted into a flat file and
subsequently displayed in notepad. Alternatively, the byte array could be
looped through and a string constructed using an ascii to character
conversion. The example has many applications, especially where web pages
are regularly updated with important data, such as share details, sports
results or new articles on pbdr.com, of course! The ability
to search through the newly created text file (or string) , then lends itself to
any specific information retrieval. One example could be to use this
method to retrieve share info at work, without blatantly surfing financial
pages - not that I would ever endorse such behavior. |
