CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netwebbrowser-control
Aximili
Aximili

Reputation: 29444

Creating a method that uses WebBrowser and returns HTML?

How do you create a method that does this:
Login to a website, then read a (member-only) page and return the HTML.

I came up with this (which obviously doesn't work because I don't know how to make it return the page content)

public string LoginAndReadPage() {
    WebBrowser wb = new WebBrowser();
    wb.DocumentCompleted += new WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventHandler(wb_DocumentCompleted);
    wb.Navigate("hxxp://mysite.com/login");
}

private async void wb_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    if (wb.Url.ToString().Contains("login"))
    {
        wb.Document.GetElementsByTagName("input").GetElementsByName("email")[0].SetAttribute("value", _login);
        wb.Document.GetElementsByTagName("input").GetElementsByName("password")[0].SetAttribute("value", _password);
        wb.Document.GetElementsByTagName("button")[0].InvokeMember("click");
    }
    else if (wb.Url.ToString().Contains("dashboard"))
    {
        return wb.DocumentText; // I want to return the content of mysite.com/dashboard
    }
    else
    {
        await Task.Delay(1000); //wait for 1 second just to let the WB catch up
        wb.Navigate("hxxp://mysite.com/dashboard");
    }
}

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 40

Answers (1)

James Crosswell
James Crosswell

Reputation: 786

What you're trying to do is called "scraping" or sometimes "webscraping". It's a big topic so I'd recommend googling it.

Potentially you could use something like Selenium via the C# Driver to do this as well. Selenium was designed for automated UI testing but it definitely has all the tools you need to do what you want.

Upvotes: 1

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