refernce website code

I am very new to programing and C#. I understand a few of the basics but I am willing to spend many hours to work with and learn making silly programs that are of a little use to me. I am wondering what I would use to get a small amount of information from a web site and work with the data. I also must log into this website to get the information. Could someone point me in the right direction?
For instance if I wanted to get a price for a specific item off Amazon how would I do it?

Contributors

Replies

Views

9 Years

Discussion Span

9 Years Ago

Last Post by constrainer

Amazon publishes an API. For that example, I'd use the Amazon API in my project.

"Getting information from a web site" is much too general of a question. Web sites are built to be accessed by human users, in most cases, not applications.

There are exceptions, such as RSS feeds and Web Services.

Oh and I guess Amazon was a bad example. The websites I am trying to get prices from are just basic and don't use API I don't think.

You want to design an application that mimics a human user, fills out an online form, and processes the resultant HTML? Why? That's a bit of a challenge, and not how most eCommerce applications work. Even the sites like PriceGrabber require that their vendors export their pricing data to them or provide it via Web Services.

If you really want to pursue this idea, you might start by doing a web search on "screen scraper".

Thank for the key word. Sorry I guess I am being a bit unclear. A website displays a differing price for a bike each day. I just want to get that price with my application then add some local shipping ect to it. Its the getting from the web page I am clueless on how to go about. I will look up screen scraper now.

Hmm the wiki article is interesting. I am not sure I need to use a screen scraper as that seems far beyond what I am trying to accomplish. Is there any way to parse HTML code online? Could I use a connection string and a data reader to read source code online?

I still maintain your initial approach is wrong. Parsing each other's HTML is not how eCommerce applications behave. But if you want to doggedly press on, then your next web search should be "C# HTML DOM".

I don't mean to be hard headed I just am ignorant of these things. Couldn't I use javascript to goto the website and view/get/download the source code and use a StreamWriter/Reader to go through and then use an array to pull out the few digits I need?

I'd look at the c# webrequest & webresponse objects in System.Net

Thanks!