Auric__ wrote:
Robert Baer wrote:

Excel macros are SO... undocumented.

Sure they are. Plenty of documentation for individual keywords. You're not
looking for that, you're looking for a broader concept than individual
keywords.

Need a WORKING example for reading the HTML source a URL (say
http://www.oil4lessllc.org/gTX.htm)

Downloading a web page (or any URI, really) is easy:

Declare Function URLDownloadToFile Lib "urlmon" _
Alias "URLDownloadToFileA" (ByVal pCaller As Long, _
ByVal szURL As String, ByVal szFileName As String, _
ByVal dwReserved As Long, ByVal lpfnCB As Long) As Long

Sub foo()
Dim tmp, result, contents
tmp = Environ("TEMP")& Format$(Now, "yyyymmdd-hhmmss-")& "gTX.htm"
'download
result = URLDownloadToFile(0, "http://www.oil4lessllc.org/gTX.htm", _
tmp, 0, 0)
If result< 0 Then
'failed to download; error handler here
Else
'read from file
Open tmp For Binary As 1
contents = Space$(LOF(1))
Get #1, 1, contents
Close 1
'parse file here
'[...]
'cleanup
End If
Kill tmp
End Sub

(Note that URLDownloadToFile must be declared PtrSafe on 64-bit versions of
Excel.)

Dealing with the data downloaded is very dependant on what the page contains
and what you want to extract from it. That page you mentioned contains 2
images and 2 Javascript arrays; assuming you want the data from the arrays,
you could search for "awls[" or "aprd[" and get your data that way.

Rather than downloading to a file, it is possible to download straight to
memory, but I find it's simpler to use a temp file. Among other things,
downloading to memory requires opening and closing the connection yourself;
URLDownloadToFile handles that for you.

Thanks.
I know that the parsing is very dependent on the contents and what
one wants.
That is why i gave an example having at least one data array; similar
to what i may be parsing.
I too, like temp files because i can open them in random and/or
binary mode if need.
A bit of fun to read such backwards (like BMP files).

Thanks again.