Pass Parameters in VBA HTTP Post Request

Question

I'm trying to do a simple post request on the main search bar of http://forums.egullet.org/. (This is one example, but I'm trying to build a tool that will work with many.)

The problem is that I can't seem to figure out the right way to structure/place the parameters such that the server processes my request. (I do get a response, but it's just a page asking me to try the search again, rather than the result I get when I do the search in a browser. The argument string was pulled straight out of firebug, so I'm fairly sure that it's correct. I just get the impression that i'm not putting it in the right place/structuring it correctly/saying everything that I need to, but I don't know what to change. It's worth noting that I previously had this working by editing the DOM of an internet explorer object, but I'm trying to switch to XMLHTTP because it's much faster/more reliable. Thanks for your help!

Sub httpPost()
Dim XMLHTTP
Dim result As String
Dim argumentString
argumentString = "?search_term=eggs&search_app=forums"
Set XMLHTTP = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP.6.0")
XMLHTTP.Open "POST", _
    "http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=search&fromMainBar=1", False
XMLHTTP.setRequestHeader "User-Agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
XMLHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
XMLHTTP.send argumentString
result = XMLHTTP.responsetext
Set XMLHTTP = Nothing
End Sub

Dick Kusleika · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-07 20:45:19Z

7

I think you need an ampersand where you have a question mark

argumentString = "&search_term=eggs&search_app=forums"

answered Aug 7, 2013 at 20:45

Dick Kusleika

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SIM · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-30 16:55:48Z

To make it more concise and get the title of that target page:

Sub httpPost()
    Dim http As New XMLHTTP60, html As New HTMLDocument
    Dim post As Object, argstr As String

    argstr = "type=all&q=eggs"

    With http
        .Open "POST", "https://forums.egullet.org/search/?", False
        .setRequestHeader "User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.115 Safari/537.36"
        .setRequestHeader "Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
        .send argstr
        html.body.innerHTML = .responseText
    End With

    For Each post In html.getElementsByClassName("ipsStreamItem_title")
        With post.getElementsByTagName("a")
            If .Length Then Row = Row + 1: Cells(Row, 1) = .Item(0).innerText
        End With
    Next post
End Sub

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