I'm a self-taught programmer. I've dabbled in C++ and am working with some VBA. I'm trying to code to speed up some very tedious procedures at my internship. I am no longer satisfied with the ability to manipulate Excel. I now need to be able to pull data from various websites and I want to be able to automate the procedure. I have no real knowledge about various programming languages and development beyond my C++, VBA, and BASIC skills. Where do I go so that I can start learning to manipulate Internet Explorer and read information from web sites? Also, is there a language that can use and call VBA functions written within each of several applications? Thanks!
IE isn't the only browser out there. You can scan web sites without using a browser. Just use the HTTP API stuff directly in your own programs.
I'm surprised you don't already know about MSDN. Anyway, that's the place to go. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/default.aspx Lookup HttpRequest for an entrypoint into the API.
I've come across it. This is really a rapid branch out from the C++ I knew. I really understand C++ programming, a little VBA, and not much else. I'm trying to get my foot in some other areas. Anyways, thanks for the reply! The website is going to help me a lot in the future.:happy:
Hi all, I am trying to create an AUTORUN.INF file to ship with a stand-alone application on CD. The interface for the application is written in HTML (index.html) and I would like to be able to run the application from CD without the need to install it on the user's machine. To do this in Linux is really easy (would take me less than 5 minutes). To do this in the Windows XP environment, however, seems to be a very different ball-game! The trouble all stems from the fact that the following autorun.inf content does not work: What happens is Internet Explorer assumes that "index.html" is a domain name in it's own right and therefore tries to load "http://index.html" which, naturally, fails. Does anyone know how you get IE to recognise a relative file path on the command line? The other solution would be to find the absolute path of index.html on the user's machine (so I can direct IE to it). In linux all you would do would be to write a CSH script, and assign the output of the pwd command to a script variable using backquotes. Something like: CWD=`pwd`. The variable adressor $CWD would then contain the value of pwd for the rest of the script. Does anyone know how to do this seemingly very simple thing in DOS? I've got as far as the CHDIR command, but I don't know how to pipe that to a variable in a DOS batch file. I have searched the net for this kind of thing, all I can find is solutions which require you to write an executable which runs IE to load the page, and which is itself run from AUTORUN.INF. That seems like an utterly pointless and long-winded faff (compared to the Linux solution), I'm sure there's got to be an easier way! After all, what I'm trying to do here is painfully simple!
As this seems to be a different question it would be better to create your own thread than to hijack someone else's discussion. Anyway, yes; just include the path, for example iexplore.exe c:\index.html The index.html file is presumably part of your distribution so you know exactly where on the CD it will be. Don't forget the command prompt in Windows is nowhere near as complex as a Unix shell. Unix is designed for programmers and shells are typically full of things a programmer would find useful. Windows cmd doesn't have those utilities and you can find them all over the place (try GnuWin32) or easily write your own. The reason you don't have to write them in Linux is that they're already written for you.
