HTTP GET in VBS

Question

Is there a way to perform an HTTP GET request within a Visual Basic script? I need to get the contents of the response from a particular URL for processing.

Thanks.

Answer 1

This post shows an example of using XmlHttp from within a VBS

Answer 2

Dim o
Set o = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")
o.open "GET", "http://www.example.com", False
o.send
' o.responseText now holds the response as a string.

Answer 3

You haven't at time of writing described what you are going to do with the response or what its content type is. An answer already contains a very basic usage of MSXML2.XMLHTTP (I recommend the more explicit MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0 progID) however you may need to do different things with the response, it may not be text.

The XMLHTTP also has a responseBody property which is a byte array version of the reponse and there is a responseStream which is an IStream wrapper for the response.

Note that in a server-side requirement (e.g., VBScript hosted in ASP) you would use MSXML.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0 or WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1 (which has a near identical interface).

Here is an example of using XmlHttp to fetch a PDF file and store it:-

Dim oXMLHTTP
Dim oStream

Set oXMLHTTP = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0")

oXMLHTTP.Open "GET", "http://someserver/folder/file.pdf", False
oXMLHTTP.Send

If oXMLHTTP.Status = 200 Then
 Set oStream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
 oStream.Open
 oStream.Type = 1
 oStream.Write oXMLHTTP.responseBody
 oStream.SaveToFile "c:\somefolder\file.pdf"
 oStream.Close
End If