CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#html
Grim
Grim

Reputation: 51

Get Information from website with C# after Js

So I'm working on a little fun project and keep in mind I'm a beginner, I want to grab the info of songs that have played from this radio channel:

ilikeradio (sorry the site is in Swedish).

I want to just simply put that in a textBox.

I have tried:

WebClient web = new WebClient();
string htmlContent = new System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(URL);

But this only gave me the source code and not the code with the list items for artist song etc.

Any help is appreciated Keep in mind I am a beginner.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2595

Answers (1)

pookie
pookie

Reputation: 4142

It seems that the URL you provided returns HTML, but if you compare the HTML you get with that which is rendered in the browser (by right-clicking the webpage and inspecting the HTML), you will see that what you get is actually different than what is finally rendered. The reason for this is that the website is using Ajax to load the song list. In other words, when you call DownloadString(), you get the results from the web serve before it has had the javascript run and update it.

It is not easy to get the final HTML render result. But you are in luck!

If you go to that website and open the debug tools in Chrome and click the Network tab. Next, sort all the requests by Method and GET requests should be at the top. Amongst those GET requests is the one you are looking for:

https://unison.mtgradio.se/api/v2/timeline?channel_id=6&client_id=6690709&to=2018-10-02T08%3A00%3A50&from=2018-10-02T07%3A00%3A50&limit=40

This URL returns JSON which the web server eventually loads and renders for you to see as a "song list".

The JSON returned is a list of songs with some metadata. You will need to parse this JSON to extract and display the list of songs in your own webpage. I suspect that you can view the source code of that website and find the Javascript to do this ;)

Newtonsoft JSONConvert is the best library for parsing JSON.

If you want to view the JSON with the song list, copy the URL above and paste it into your browser address bar (and hit enter). Next, copy the JSON result and then open this. Paste JSON into the Text tab and then click the Viewer tab. You will note that the first element is the Current Song, while other elements are in the song list. Also note that each element has a child element called song, which contains the title.

To get you going, try this:

using System;
using System.Net;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
         WebClient web = new WebClient();
         using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
         {
            var json = wc.DownloadString("https://unison.mtgradio.se/api/v2/timeline?channel_id=6&client_id=6690709&to=2018-10-02T08%3A00%3A50&from=2018-10-02T07%3A00%3A50&limit=40");
            dynamic stuff = JArray.Parse(json);
            string name = stuff[1].song.title;
            Console.WriteLine(name);
         }
    }
}

NOTE

By the time you try this out, you will notice that the song name printed to console does not exist in the list on the webpage. This is because if you look at the JSON URL that I posted above, there are query parameters... one of which is date and time. You will need to modify the URL accordingly to get the most recent (displayed right now on the website) playlist.

Upvotes: 1

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