How to scrape text from an html page using C#?

I have a web page that when navigated to only returns a simple text value, like the number 100. I need to grab that value from the page, so I can use it in my application. The application is a simple Windows Forms app, with a web browser control on it.

I have tried numerous things, but it's not grabbing the text, as if it doesn't exist. Yet if I right click and view source, it's there.

This can't be that difficult...It's just some text.

Just to clarify the document contains NO html, only a number. When using WebClient or WebRequest, it doesn't return the value.

    private void RegisterWindow_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        webBrowser1.Navigate("MYURL");
        webBrowser1.DocumentCompleted += new WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventHandler(webBrowser1_DocumentCompleted);

    }

    void webBrowser1_DocumentCompleted(object sender, WebBrowserDocumentCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        // Check a开发者_如何转开发nd see if we have navigated to the final page.
        string registeredUrl = "MYURL";
        string currentPage = webBrowser1.Url.ToString();
        string response = string.Empty;

        if (webBrowser1.Url.ToString() == registeredUrl)
        {
            // Now parse the authkey from the url
            response = GetWebRequest(currentPage);
            MessageBox.Show(response);
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Send a Web Request and get a Web Response back. 
    /// This respons can be a valid URL, simple text response, or 
    /// HTML response.        
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="url"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public string GetWebRequest(string url)
    {
        var client = new WebClient();
        var content = client.DownloadString(url);

        return content;
    }

If the document contains only number without any HTML, this should work:

public string GetWebRequest()
{
    return webBrowser1.Document.Body.InnerText;
}

You should be able to do something as straightforward as:

var client = new WebClient();
var content = client.DownloadString("<YOUR URL>");
var number = Int32.Parse(content);

MSDN documentation for DownloadString(string).

I wrote a blog post on Web scraping in .NET several years ago. You could try the techniques there. Hopefully they're not obsolete.

For example:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);

request.UserAgent = _UserAgent;
request.CookieContainer = cookies;  // optional

using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
{
  using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
  {
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream))
    {
      html = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
  }
}

Remember that your browser is sending a User-Agent header, may be sending cookies, may be going through a configured proxy server, etc. Particularly for secured or intranet sites, a simple WebClient call may be insufficient. You may need to do some checking with Fiddler as @SLaks suggested.

You can load the page HTML/TXT content to a string then use a string function to extract the number.