Retreiving data from internet into VB application

I am trying to determine the best way to write a program that will allow me to download information from a web site and write the data to a text file, Access database, Excel spreadsheet etc. For example, if I wanted to create a MS Access database that populated a table with the historical closing stock price of a particular stock, based on some parameters etc.

Currently, the only way I know to accomplish a task like this is to download the HTML of the web page into a variable and write code to manually parse the data and extract the few relevant characters from the file. While this is obviously cumbersome, it also generally requires finding some unique "set-off" in the html that can be used as the basis for parsing the string data.

I am clearly a recreational programmer - but I like to read / learn more. Could someone please give me some idea on how to accomplish this or what general skills I need to enhance (html, xml etc.) and perhaps point me to a good source for learning. Thanks

Sign In or Register to comment.

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Categories