How do I use a URL as a connnection string in ASP

[Johnnie100]

Help,

I am wanting to read in a web page, and use the information within, as part of my MSc project - I have heard that it's possible to use a URL as a connection string using VBScript & ASP - can anyone confirm this is true?

More importantly can anyone explain or give me an example of how to do this please? The HTML page is on a different IIS, but I understand that if I can 'contact' it then I can read it in, strip away the HTML tags and process it as a normal recordset - is this the case or has someone been telling me pork pies???

Cheers
Andy

 

[vasah20]

You can do it, it's called something called screen scraping.

Typically, if you want to do it, you're going to need to create a DLL to do it for you... Unfortunately, you can't do it using regular ASP. (I know you can with ASP .Net...)

hth
leo

 

[Johnnie100]

Is there any particular language that the dll would have to be written in or are there dll's out there that could just dump me a web page into one of my local directories as a text file or would you suggest the best way would be to populate a recordset directly with the information from the HTML page.

Any pointers as to how this could be achieved or information on screen scraping in general(using VBscript and ASP) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Andy