Alternative to inet & webbrowser control to retrieve HTML only? - vb6

Question

I would like to download only the HTML code in my VB6 program.
Webbrowser control is good but it hangs and also it has issues such as needing to disable the JavaScript, pic, etc in order to get just the HTML
The Inet control is better, but it is "buggy"
Is there any other control ?

Answer 1

If you only want to download the HTML of a page, you can easily use Winsock control.
Private Sub Form_Load()
Winsock1.Connect "stackoverflow.com", 80
End Sub
Private Sub Winsock1_Close()
Winsock1.Close
End Sub
Private Sub Winsock1_Connect()
Winsock1.SendData "GET /questions/8624871/vb6-alternative-to-inet-webbrowser-control HTTP/1.1" & vbCrLf & "Host: stackoverflow.com" & vbCrLf & vbCrLf
End Sub
Private Sub Winsock1_DataArrival(ByVal bytesTotal As Long)
Dim s As String
Winsock1.GetData s, vbString
RichTextBox1.Text = RichTextBox1.Text & s
End Sub

Answer 2

My suggestion is to host WebKit.NET in your VB 6 application just like you would any other .NET control.
Although it is a .NET control, which means that it won't work natively out-of-the-box with VB 6, it is possible to use controls developed in .NET with a VB 6 application. Microsoft provides the Interop Forms Toolkit as an interoperability mechanism between the two languages.
Essentially, you'll use one of the .NET languages (it doesn't have to be VB.NET; you could also use C#) to create an ActiveX DLL containing your UserControl and register it for COM interop. Then, you can add this ActiveX control to your VB 6 project and hook up to handle the events it raises.
You can find a more complete sample on how to do this here on CodeProject, or here on CodeGuru.
Indeed this approach is not going to be trivial to implement. But I suspect that it's your only alternative to the bundled WebBrowser control, considering that IE was pretty much dominating the browser market back when VB 6 was popular and no one is developing new controls for VB 6 anymore.

Answer 3

You don't need API calls, you don't need WinSock, you don't need Inet, you don't need WebKit interop. Just do it the easy way, using native VB6 code. Here's an excellent article by Karl Peterson with sample code.

Answer 4

This is good code, and it works even in ASP, VBScript.
Function GetHTMLCode(strURL) As String
Dim strReturn ' As String
Dim objHTTP ' As MSXML.XMLHTTPRequest
If Len(strURL)=0 Then EXIT FUNCTION
Set objHTTP = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
objHTTP.open "GET", strURL,False
objHTTP.send 'Get it.
strReturn =objHTTP.responseText
Set objHTTP = Nothing
GetHTMLCode = strReturn
End Function
Now call this function like this (always write with protocol):
Msgbox GetHTMLCode("http://www.stackoverflow.com")