Import Twitter XML into Visual Basic

Question

Hello, I'm trying to import an XML that's provided by twitter into a readable format in Visual Basic.

XML looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
- <statuses type="array">
  - <status>
     <created_at>Mon Jan 18 20:41:19 +0000 2010</created_at> 
     <id>111111111</id> 
     <text>thattext</text> 
     <source><a href="http://www.seesmic.com/" rel="nofollow">Seesmic</a></source> 
     <truncated>false</truncated> 
     <in_reply_to_status_id>7916479948</in_reply_to_status_id> 
     <in_reply_to_user_id>90978206</in_reply_to_user_id> 
     <favorited>false</favorited> 
     <in_reply_to_screen_name>radonsystems</in_reply_to_screen_name> 
      - <user>
         <id>20193170</id> 
         <name>personname</name> 
         <screen_name>screenname</screen_name> 
         <location>loc</location> 
         <description>desc</description> 
   <profile_image_url>http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/747012343/twitter_normal.png&lt;/profile_image_url&gt; 
         <url>myurl</url> 
         <protected>false</protected> 
         <followers_count>97</followers_count> 
         <profile_background_color>ffffff</profile_background_color> 
         <profile_text_color>333333</profile_text_color> 
         <profile_link_color>0084B4</profile_link_color> 
         <profile_sidebar_fill_color>ffffff</profile_sidebar_fill_color> 
         <profile_sidebar_border_color>ababab</profile_sidebar_border_color> 
         <friends_count>76</friends_count> 
         <created_at>Thu Feb 05 21:54:24 +0000 2009</created_at> 
         <favourites_count>1</favourites_count> 
         <utc_offset>0</utc_offset> 
         <time_zone>London</time_zone> 
         <profile_background_image_url>http://a3.twimg.com/profile_background_images/76723999/754686.png&lt;/profile_background_image_url&gt; 
         <profile_background_tile>true</profile_background_tile> 
         <notifications>false</notifications> 
         <geo_enabled>true</geo_enabled> 
         <verified>false</verified> 
         <following>false</following> 
      <statuses_count>782</statuses_count> 
      <lang>en</lang> 
      <contributors_enabled>false</contributors_enabled> 
   </user>
  <geo /> 
  <coordinates /> 
  <place /> 
  <contributors /> 
  </status>
  </statuses>

Now, I want to display it in a panel that automatically refresh after a certain period, however, I only want to pick out certain bits of info from that xml, such as profile_image_url and text and created_at. You can guess how the data will be formatted, much like that presented in TweetDeck and other Twitter clients.

I'm quite new to Visual Basic, so how could I do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Use the MSXML com object to parse the xml and then pull out the bits you need.

Answer 2

You will need to parse the XML, looking for the relevant tags (such as created_at) and then retrieving their data. I did this recently in C# using the XmlReader class and it worked well.

Here is a link to the Visual Basic docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189056(VS.95).aspx

As you can see in the link, you just switch on the node type and perform the relevant action. This is a fast way to parse the Xml as it doesn't load the whole document into memory.