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Hi everyone,
I'm currently working on a 'windows forms' project that requires me to get some text from a website and display it within the program.

I have my public sub below, which basically reads the source code of the site in question, converts it to a string from a byte, and displays it in a multi-line textbox on the form.
VB
Public Sub LoadSiteContent(ByVal url As String)
  Dim client As New WebClient
  Dim html As Byte() = client.DownloadData(url)
  Dim webString As String = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(html)
  TextBox1.Text = webString
End Sub

This sub gets all the source code, whereas I only want a specific paragraph on the site, so is there a way to scale down the string I converted to just that paragraph within the page source? Maybe through using regular expressions or substrings?

I also have this import at the top of my class:
VB
Imports System.Net

Any response is greatly appreciated, thanks.
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Comments
David Goebet 5-Dec-12 9:20am    
so you want to try to read some special text in the "html-code" right ?
so you could search your string for a specific phrase

something like "<span> News News News </span>"
there you can search "<span>" ... read till "</span>"

This is probably a bit more that you think you wanted, but...
The process is called "Web scraping", and there is a nice article about it here: Web Scraping in ASP.NET with Regular Expression Matching and XML Transformation[^] - it's in C#, but the code is easily translatable, and the description is very clear.
 
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If there is a fixed text before and after that paragraph on the webpage (ex- some tag with id='xyz') you can find it in the string returned and then get the required paragraph from that. I have done this in one of my application hope it will be helpful for u also. please mark as answer if helped.
 
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