CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#screen-scrapingphpbb
Tyler Treat
Tyler Treat

Reputation: 14998

Logging in to phpBB forum programmatically through C#

I'm working on a C# application that needs to scrape some data from a phpBB forum. The forum scraping requires logging in. The application will prompt the user for their login credentials to connect.

I've scraped websites before with C#, but what I'm not sure how to do is login to phpBB and keep a session open during the duration of the screen scraping. I've done some searching and haven't had much luck. Is there a good way to programmatically do something like this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 900

Answers (4)

Richard Schneider
Richard Schneider

Reputation: 35477

I recommend using HTML Agility Pack.

Upvotes: 0

Bibhu
Bibhu

Reputation: 4081

I would recommend using WatiN API for doing screen scraping. I have done screen scraping using this API and it does good work. Check it out !

Upvotes: 0

Martin Booth
Martin Booth

Reputation: 8595

You don't say what you've tried, but if you used an HttpWebRequest object to retrieve pages and/or logon, then you need to assign a new CookieContainer collection to the HttpWebRequest to store any cookies returned by the website. Share this amongst HttpWebRequest objects to remain logged in

Upvotes: 1

jcomeau_ictx
jcomeau_ictx

Reputation: 38442

look for the names of the username and password fields using Firebug or Chrome (or even View Source), then use my answer here: Programmatically logging into a site, replacing 'session_key' and 'session_password' as appropriate. that should work.

and then translate to C#!

Upvotes: 0

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