Delivering Form Data Through XMLHTTP in VBA

I've been dealing with Stand out 2010. I am attempting to send form data with the XMLHTTP object to obtain a web page without luck. The web site I am working from is http://espn.go.com/major league baseball/gamers and I am trying to find a particular player with the searchbox (e.g. Fister). This is actually the source code between your form tags.

<form id="searchBox" title="searchBox" action="http://search.espn.go.com/results" method="get" accept-charset="utf-8" style="color: #999999">

<div class="clearfix">

<input autocomplete="off" class="text" type="text" placeholder="Search" title="searchString" id="searchString" />

<input type="hidden" title="page" id="page" value="null" />

<input type="hidden" title="fromForm" value="true" />

<input class="submit" type="submit" value="" />

</div>

</form>

My code to try to perform the search is below.

Sub SearchPlayer()

Dim xml As MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP

Dim search, url As String

search = "searchString=Fister&page=null&fromForm=true"

url = "http://espn.go.com/major league baseball/gamers"

Set xml = New MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP

xml.Open "Publish", url, False

xml.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-world wide web-form-urlencoded"

xml.send search

MsgBox xml.responseText

Set xml = Nothing

Finish Sub

post website excel-vba xmlhttp form-data

This code labored for me personally:

Function SearchPlayer(playerName As String) As String

Dim xml As MSXML2.XMLHTTP60

Dim result As String

Const BASE_URL As String = "http://search.espn.go.com/results?searchString=title&page=null&fromForm=true"

Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP.6.")

With xml

  .Open "GET", Replace(BASE_URL, "title", playerName), False

  .send

Finish With

result = xml.responseText

SearchPlayer = result

Finish Function

(assumes you've MSXML 6. in your system -- msxml6.dll inside your local system32 folder)

As mentioned, the shape utilizes a GET request so you would employ the experience attribute and append the INPUT tags' values onto just one string such as this:

http://search.espn.go.com/results?searchString=Fister&page=null&fromForm=true

I functionized the Sub to help you refer to it as with various player names to scrape each page. Obviously, you'd require a urlencode function should you expect so that it is known as with player names which have spaces inside them (here's one).

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