I am trying to do a very simple web page read from within a 4D database
procedure but so far I have not been able to find any examples or anything
that gives me the least clue as to how this can be done. The closest I
have
been able to get is a function named CALL WEB SERVICES that evidently is
intended to interface with very specific subsets of web page data such as
java applets and forms data but the interface is very rich, not simply
described in the do***entation and gives the impression that it is so
complex that it could not possibly be used for such a simple task. What
I want to do is to be able to feed a given URL to a function which will
then
retrieve the web page and return the HTML text to me for manual parsing.
You would think that such a simple case would be the very first example
given in the 4D Language do***entation but this sure is not the case.
There is also a 4D extension called "4D Internet Commands" that looks
promising, but while this includes functions for SMTP, POP3 and FTP
access, there is no mention of HTTP at all so I have not looked much
farther into this information.
My closest workaround has been to use 4D to ex****t an HTML page
containing the links I need to read, then to use Netscape to read and save
those pages to text files and finally to read those text files back into
4D.
While infinitely better than the purely manual copy and paste method
I had been using previously, this is still a very klunky way to do things.
If there are any 4D developers out there who can aim me in the right
direction on how to do this simple task, I would be very grateful.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
PCR
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