Visual Basic provides a straightforward way to build web scrapers on Windows. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can explain concepts and generate VB code for scraping. This article covers web scraping in VB with ChatGPT's help.
Setting Up Visual Basic for Web Scraping
You'll need VB installed along with these libraries:
' Microsoft XML for parsing HTML
Imports System.Xml
' JSON.NET for JSON parsing
Imports Newtonsoft.Json
' CSVHelper for CSV output
Imports CsvHelper
Introduction to Web Scraping in VB
Web scraping involves sending requests to websites and extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML responses. Useful VB options:
Typical web scraping workflow:
Using ChatGPT for Web Scraping Help
ChatGPT is an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It can provide explanations and generate VB code snippets for web scraping:
Getting Explanations
Ask ChatGPT to explain web scraping concepts or specifics:
Generating Code Snippets
Give a description of what you want to scrape and have ChatGPT provide starter VB code:
Validate any code before using.
Improving Prompts
Ask ChatGPT to suggest ways to improve your prompt if it doesn't provide helpful responses.
Asking Follow-up Questions
Chat with ChatGPT to get explanations for any other questions you have.
Explaining Errors
Share any errors and ask ChatGPT to debug and explain the problem.
Web Scraping Example Using ChatGPT
Let's walk through scraping a Wikipedia page with ChatGPT's assistance.
Goal
Extract the chronology table from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
Step 1: Download page
ChatGPT: VB code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>
' ChatGPT provides this code
Dim request As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>")
Dim response As HttpWebResponse = request.GetResponse()
Dim reader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())
Dim html As String = reader.ReadToEnd()
Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable
Step 3: Extract table data to CSV
ChatGPT: VB code to extract wikitable table to CSV
' ChatGPT provides this code
Dim htmlDoc As HtmlDocument = New HtmlDocument()
htmlDoc.LoadHtml(html)
Dim table = htmlDoc.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//table[contains(@class, 'wikitable')]")
' Extract headers
Dim headers = table.SelectNodes("./thead/tr/th").Select(Function(x) x.InnerText)
' Extract rows
Dim rows = table.SelectNodes("./tbody/tr").Select(Function(x) x.SelectNodes("./td").Select(Function(y) y.InnerText))
' Write rows to CSV file
This shows using ChatGPT to get VB scraping code fast.
Conclusion
Key points:
ChatGPT + VB is great for creating web scrapers.
However, some limitations:
A more robust solution is using a web scraping API like Proxies API
Proxies API provides:
Easily scrape any site:
' Send request to Proxies API endpoint
Dim request As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX")
Dim response As HttpWebResponse = request.GetResponse()Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!