CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidsearch
user3635980
user3635980

Reputation: 1

How to use user input to search a website through an app

I want to make an app that asks the user for an input and then it'll search a website and have it display the results.

I know I'm gonna have to do some web scraping to make the app display the results but the thing I'm stuck on is how to do the searching. I want it to be as if the user is using the search function on the website itself. For example, if a user types into the app's search bar "chairs", the app would show wikipedia's results for "chairs"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 135

Answers (1)

user184994
user184994

Reputation: 18301

Using your Wikipedia example, it's fairly straight forwards. You send a GET request to the Wikipedia site, and it will return the correct page. GET requests use parameters appended to the end of the URL, so take

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=

And append your query chairs and you get http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=chairs

With Wikipedia, you need to replace the spaces with a + symbol. So if you wanted to search for Musical Chairs, it would be

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Musical+Chairs

The URL will be different for each site, but it should be fairly easy to find it if you look at the html, or even looking at the URL in your browser after you search on the site

Upvotes: 1

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