Extracting information off a website

[Toxic_Ninja]

I was wondering if it is possible to take information off a website and have it display on VB. For example, the showtimes on a theater website but all you would get is the text without the fancy graphics (note: the site is one that I don't own or anything so I can't modify it's content).

[[Gandalf]]

You would have to open a connection to the website using some Visual Basic net module, download the relevant HTML, parse it so that you know where your information is located, and finally just copy it over to wherever you need to use it.

[Toxic_Ninja]

Thank you, but since I'm still mostly a noob alot of that is too complicated. Can you please explain what a "Visual Basic net module" is? And how do you "Parse"?

[Aziz]

It's going to require some more advanced programming experience than you apparently have. However, by buddy recently did something like this. First he checked if 'My.Computer.Network.IsConnected' or something like that, then there was a function to download the content from the page. Now parsing is going to be the hard part. Parsing means extracting information from something (in a sorts). To parse a webpage to find your information, you would have to filter through the text of the HTML and find the tags that you're looking for.

[bugzpodder]

depending on the website, there maybe possibilities you could get a web feed from it, which is infinitely easier to parse than raw html.