Question

I want to develop a program that uses an online API, with GET and POST requests, and I want to know how to make the requests within the program (without the user seeing a web page), and then download the results into the program so I can parse them

Answer 1

You’re looking for the WebRequest class. This example has been adapted from the msdn documentation:

Dim request As WebRequest = WebRequest.Create('http://www.example.com/example.html') ' Get the response. Dim response As HttpWebResponse = CType(request.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse) ' Get the stream containing content returned by the server. Dim dataStream As Stream = response.GetResponseStream() ' Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access. Dim reader As New StreamReader(dataStream) ' Read the content. Dim responseFromServer As String = reader.ReadToEnd()