Extracting Data from Website

Hi,

This is my first post on this website that was recommended to me by my computing teacher. I have only recently started to learn C# programming and I'm playing around with a project for my mothers business as a letting agent to find properties for her to rent. I find suitable properties by extracting information such as the date of the listing, mobile phone numbers and cost per week.

I have managed to get phone numbers of pages by using the following code with the following URL

http://www.gumtree.com/p/flats-houses/4-bedroom-terraced-student-house-to-rent-in-university-area/1022509215

CODE:

public void GetMobileNumber()

{

//This code will find matches on single webpages and store them in a match collection

string UserURL = textBox1.Text;

WebClient MyWebClient = new WebClient();

//the url in the following line is for testing and must be changeing according to a search variable later!!!!

String HTMLString = MyWebClient.DownloadString(UserURL);

MatchCollection MatchedMobiles = Regex.Matches(HTMLString, "\\s*(.+?)\\s*", RegexOptions.Singleline);

//This code will put the matches into the list defined above

foreach (Match m in MatchedMobiles)

{

string MobileNumber = m.Groups[1].Value;

string FirstTwoNumbers = MobileNumber.Substring(0, 2);

if (FirstTwoNumbers == "07")

{

MobileNumberList.Add(MobileNumber);

}

MobileNumberList = MobileNumberList.Distinct().ToList();

ListBoxPhoneNumbers.DataSource = MobileNumberList;

}

I'm struggling to do the same thing but for date added on the following URL:

http://www.gumtree.com/search?current_distance=&seller_type=private&property_type=&min_property_number_beds=&max_property_number_beds=&min_price=&max_price=&q=&search_location=Reading&category=flats-and-houses-for-rent&search_scope=title

Any help would be much appreciated,

Many Thanks and Kind Regards

James

1 Reply

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Anupam Singh12y ago
Hi james,

Welcome to C# corner.

Actually you are trying find data from html pages.
An interesting thing about html pages is if you want to display something on page, there are many ways:
1. display direct inside body tag :

your text

2. display data in element

your text

and many more.

In your working code you are retrieving data from

\\s*(.+?)\\s*

which is a span tag. And it might be different in http://www.gumtree.com.

So you have to check rendered html first and then apply your method on it.

Happy Coding :)