Develop Reference

Get Information from website with C# after Js

So I'm working on a little fun project and keep in mind I'm a beginner, I want to grab the info of songs that have played from this radio channel:
ilikeradio (sorry the site is in Swedish).
I want to just simply put that in a textBox.
I have tried:
WebClient web = new WebClient();
string htmlContent = new System.Net.WebClient().DownloadString(URL);
But this only gave me the source code and not the code with the list items for artist song etc.
Any help is appreciated Keep in mind I am a beginner.

It seems that the URL you provided returns HTML, but if you compare the HTML you get with that which is rendered in the browser (by right-clicking the webpage and inspecting the HTML), you will see that what you get is actually different than what is finally rendered. The reason for this is that the website is using Ajax to load the song list. In other words, when you call DownloadString(), you get the results from the web serve before it has had the javascript run and update it.
It is not easy to get the final HTML render result. But you are in luck!
If you go to that website and open the debug tools in Chrome and click the Network tab. Next, sort all the requests by Method and GET requests should be at the top. Amongst those GET requests is the one you are looking for:
https://unison.mtgradio.se/api/v2/timeline?channel_id=6&client_id=6690709&to=2018-10-02T08%3A00%3A50&from=2018-10-02T07%3A00%3A50&limit=40
This URL returns JSON which the web server eventually loads and renders for you to see as a "song list".
The JSON returned is a list of songs with some metadata. You will need to parse this JSON to extract and display the list of songs in your own webpage. I suspect that you can view the source code of that website and find the Javascript to do this ;)
Newtonsoft JSONConvert is the best library for parsing JSON.
If you want to view the JSON with the song list, copy the URL above and paste it into your browser address bar (and hit enter). Next, copy the JSON result and then open this. Paste JSON into the Text tab and then click the Viewer tab. You will note that the first element is the Current Song, while other elements are in the song list. Also note that each element has a child element called song, which contains the title.
To get you going, try this:
using System;
using System.Net;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;
public class Program
{
public static void Main()
{
WebClient web = new WebClient();
using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
{
var json = wc.DownloadString("https://unison.mtgradio.se/api/v2/timeline?channel_id=6&client_id=6690709&to=2018-10-02T08%3A00%3A50&from=2018-10-02T07%3A00%3A50&limit=40");
dynamic stuff = JArray.Parse(json);
string name = stuff[1].song.title;
Console.WriteLine(name);
}
}
}
NOTE
By the time you try this out, you will notice that the song name printed to console does not exist in the list on the webpage. This is because if you look at the JSON URL that I posted above, there are query parameters... one of which is date and time. You will need to modify the URL accordingly to get the most recent (displayed right now on the website) playlist.

C# WebClient DownloadString and DownloadFile giving different results

I am attempting to retrieve some information from a website, parse out a specific item, and then move on with my life.
I noticed that when I check "view source" on the website, the results match with what I see when I use the WebClient class' method of DownloadFile. On the other hand, when I use the DownloadString method, the contents of that string are different from both view source and DownloadFile.
I need DownloadString to return similar contents to view source and DownloadFile. Any suggestions? My relevant code is below:
string criticalPathUrl = "http://blahblahblah&sessionId=" + sessionId;
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
//this is different
string urlContentsString = wc.DownloadString(criticalPathUrl);
//than this
wc.DownloadFile(criticalPathUrl, "rawDlTxt2.txt");
Edit: Please ignore this question as I just didn't scroll up far enough. Ugh. One of those days.

use download data instead of downloadstring and use suitable encoding to convert the string then save the file!
watch details: https://www.pavey.me/2016/04/aspnet-c-downloadstring-vs-downloaddata.html

How to get field data from opened webpage using c#

I have php website on server and c# winform on client.
is there any way to get field value of the php current page using c#?
for example, in the php I have firstName field of customer (he just typed it) and I need to use this value in the c# program.
Thanks in advance!

suppose u have a php script in which you get firstName (let's say getName.php):
<?php
$firstName = $_POST['firstName']; // or any other way to get it
$arr = array('firstname' => $firstName);
echo json_encode($arr);
?>
this will show something like this:
{"firstname": your_firstname }
so now this JSON can be used in any programming language that you want. In your case for C#:
Use the WebClient class in System.Net:
var json = new WebClient().DownloadString("url_of_php_file");
Keep in mind that WebClient is IDisposable, so you would probably add a using statement to this in production code. This would look like:
using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
{
var json = wc.DownloadString("url_of_php_file");
}

What's the most efficient way to visit a .html page?

I have a .html page that just has 5 characters on it (4 numbers and a period).
The only way I know of is to make a webbrowser that navigates to a URL, then use
browser.GetElementByID();
However that uses IE so I'm sure it's slow. Is there any better way (without using an API, something built into C#) to simply visit a webpage in a fashion that you can read off of it?

Try these 2 lines:
var wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
string html = wc.DownloadString("http://google.com"); // Your page will be in that html variable

It appears that you want to download a url, parse it as html then to find an element and read its inner text, right? Use nuget to grab a reference to HtmlAgilityPack, then:
using(var wc = new System.Net.WebClient()){
string html = wc.DownloadString("http://foo.com");
var doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
var el = doc.GetElementbyId("foo");
if(el != null)
{
var text = el.InnerText;
Console.WriteLine(text);
}
}

Without using any APIs? You're in the .NET framework, so you're already using an abstraction layer to some extent. But if you want pure C# without any addons, you could just open a TCP socket to the site and download the contents (it's just a formatted string, after all) and read the data.
Here's a similar question: How to get page via TcpClient?

Fetching string from webpage into C# Form application

I want to set up a webpage with one small simple string on it. No images, no CSS, not anything else. Just a plain string that is not very long (maximum 20 char).
What is the best way to fetch this string with a C# Form application to use it for a variety of different purposes in the program, like showing people what the newest version of the software is when they boot it up.

I'd use System.Net.WebClient myself like this:
using (var client = new WebClient())
{
string result = client.DownloadString("http://www.test.com");
// TODO: do something with the downloaded result from the remote
}

Try using System.Net.WebClient:
string remoteUri = "http://www.myserver.com/mypage.aspx";
WebClient myWebClient = new WebClient();
string version = myWebClient.DownloadString(remoteUri);