Question

probably it is a silly question, but I couldn’t find the answer in Google so far.
I need to read the HTML source code of a page
http://Mysite/ViewRequest.aspx?request_id=xxx.
I’ve setup following

wc = new-object -com internetexplorer.application
$wc.visible = $false
$wc.navigate2($strGRSpage).Document
$wc.silent = $true
$wc.visible = $false
$GRSstr = $wc.Document.body.IHTMLElement_outerText

Unfortunately the IE page pops up, even if I set $wc.silent = $true and $wc.visible = $false.
Is there another way (even with HTTP request GET) to retrieve that data without getting the IE page.
NOTE. The site http://Mysite/ViewRequest.aspx?request_id=xxx supports just IE and Mozilla. When I tried to use Webclient Class I get always unsupported browser.

In VBscript following works (but I want it in Powershell)

Set oHTML = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")  
Set oWeb = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")  
oHTML.open "GET" , strGRSpage, false 
oHTML.send  
strGRStext = oHTML.responseText  

Many thanks,

Marco

Answer 1

You just have to add an appropriate user-agent header.

For example:

$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)")
$wc.DownloadFile("http://whatsmyuseragent.com/","d:\index.html")