CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#phpformsdownloadsubmit
LA Guy 88
LA Guy 88

Reputation: 71

Downloading a file from a Subscription website ( PHP pages ) using C#

I'm a Asp.Net C# developer and I want to download a CSV file from a PHP Site. Apologize if this has already been covered, but in this case, the Link is showing javascript form submit.

Right now we login on the login page and then enter a date on the search page. The results page shows the results in Html and also has a "download" link which when clicked will server a CSV file.

We would like to "pull" the CSV file periodically via some Screen Scraping / download of the file.

The "download" link shows the following javascript to submit a form back to the server to download the CSV file:

javascript:document.aForm.action='download.php'; setTarget();document.aForm.submit();

I want to setup a C# console application to run periodically to: Login, and download the CSV file.

  1. Can I use the webclient downloaddata method to access this CSV file ? A code sample please.

  2. Can I do some programmatic scraping to login and fill in some search criteria and get to the results page to download the csv ?

What is recommended to this ? html agility pack ? any links or code snippets is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for any assistance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1849

Answers (1)

FosterZ
FosterZ

Reputation: 3911

Yes you can use WebClient class and for downloading a file you can use WebClient.DownloadFile method

OR

You can you Curl libcurl .net for reference you can follow this post

To login to a specific Page you can try this

WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
byte[] bret = client.UploadData("http://www.website.com/post.php", "POST",
            System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("field1=value1&field2=value2") );

string sret = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bret);

Once you have got success response, you can parse that response string to get that hyperlink, and then use Webclient.DownloadFile to download file

    try
    {
        client.DownloadFile("http://www.xyz.com/download.php","abc.csv");
        Console.WriteLine("File Saved.");
    }
    catch (WebException we)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(we.Message + "\n" + we.Status.ToString());
    }
    catch (NotSupportedException ne)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(ne.Message);
    }

And i guess in your case that hyperlink javascript is doing a post to download.php, so instead of using webclient.downloadFile you can simple do a post manually using webclient. above i have shown you how to post.

Upvotes: 1

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