Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Find All Links in a Web Page

Problem

You want to retrieve all the hyperlinks in a Web page (perhaps because you want to download those pages also).

Solution

Retrieve the page using WebResponse, and use a regular expression to search for URIs.

Discussion

Retrieving links in a Web page is conceptually quite easy but often more difficult in practice. The problem is that Web pages follow a semi-standardized format and tolerate a great deal of variance. For example, a hyperlink can be added in the href attribute of an anchor, the onclick attribute of a JavaScript element such as a button, and so on. The URI itself could be relative (in which case it needs to be interpreted relative to the current page), fully qualified (in which case it can have one of ...