Search website and Pull URL of an Image

Hi all I have a question maybe someone can help me with.

WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO: I am writing an excel program, this program automatically opens up a browser, navigates to a website, then searches the content of the website to find the URL of a specific picture, and the URL to which the picture links to. The URL for both the picture and the link contain a specific string which is defined as a variable from the excel sheet.

EXAMPLE: The program opens up IE, IE automatically navigates to www.pencil.com (made up website). The website displays the different pencils they sell, similar to this set up from newgg.com:http://www.newegg.com/store/category...19&Tpk=monitorThe program then searches the different images for an instant of a string that was defined in the excelsheet, for example ultragrippencil. When it finds an instance of this name in the image URL and the link URL, it will copy both and paste them back into excel.

Any help or advice is much appreciated! Thanks in advance

odo-

This is the HTML code from the website

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

My question is how can I pull the Image URL (www.google.com/biggoogle.jpg), and the Link URL (www.google.com) from the HTML using VBA and excel? All links and URL's have been replaced with made up ones.

odo-

Chippy,

Again thank you for your help! Your code helped me out a lot~ I have a question though:

The reference you had as a URL (highlighted in green and in bold) is actually a global string variable defined from another private sub procedure in my program. I tried to change this to the variable's name, as well as change all references to it (highlighted in purple) in the code but I still get a "Byref argument mismatch". A simple fix would be to make the sub procedure paste the URL into a cell, and have the Find_Matching_Images procedure reference that cell.. but I'm just curious is there a better and more professional way to do this?

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

This is an example of my setup:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

Again thanks for your help!

odo-

Your modified version ran successfully on my computer; I didn't get the "Byref argument mismatch" error.

As far as I can see, all you've done in Find_Matching_Images() is change the variable name of the first parameter from sWebSiteURL to x, and the one line that references it, IE.navigate x.

Within Find_Matching_Images(), 'x' is still a local variable (because it's declared in the parameter list), not the global 'x' you've defined, so your modified Find_Matching_Images() is effectively the same as mine. Your global 'x' is only global within Define_Variables() and Test(), and Test() is passing the global value of 'x' to the local variable 'x' in Find_Matching_Images(). Do you see how using the same variable name for a global and local variable is confusing?!

If you want to use your global 'x' string within Find_Matching_Images(), you would change the sub parameter definition to:

Private Sub Find_Matching_Images(sImageSearchString As String, destinationStartCell As Range)

BUT, global variables are generally bad programming and should only be used when absolutely necessary. In this case I can't see the point of using a global.

Instead, you could put the web site URL in a cell, for example A1 in Sheet1, and call Find_Matching_Images() like this:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

The search word could also be picked up from a cell. I gave a clue to this method in the last sentence of my first post.

If you are calling Find_Matching_Images() in a loop with many different web sites and/or image search strings and performance is an issue, one change I would make to my original code is to move the declaration/definition of the IE object outside Find_Matching_Images() and pass it as a parameter instead, like this:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

With this the IE object is created and destroyed only once, resulting in a faster run time.