How to parse the HTML of a website with PowerShell

Question

I am trying to retrieve some information about a website, I want to look for a specific tag/class and then return the contained text value (innerHTML). This is what I have so far

$request = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -UseBasicParsing
$HTML = New-Object -Com "HTMLFile"
$src = $request.RawContent
$HTML.write($src)


foreach ($obj in $HTML.all) { 
    $obj.getElementsByClassName('some-class-name') 
}

I think there is a problem with converting the HTML into the HTML object, since I see a lot of undefined properties and empty results when I'm trying to "Select-Object" them.

So after spending two days, how am I supposed to parse HTML with Powershell?

• I can't use IHTMLDocument2 methods, since I don't have Office installed (Unable to use IHTMLDocument2)
• I can't use the Invoke-Webrequest without -UseBasicParsing since the Powershell hangs and spawns additional windows while accessing the ParsedHTML property (parsedhtml doesnt respond anymore and Using Invoke-Webrequest in PowerShell 3.0 spawns a Windows Security Warning)

So since parsing HTML with regex is such a big no-no, how do I do it otherwise? Nothing seems to work.

Answer 1

Since noone else has posted an answer, I managed to get a working solution with the following code:

$request = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $URL -UseBasicParsing
$HTML = New-Object -Com "HTMLFile"
[string]$htmlBody = $request.Content
$HTML.write([ref]$htmlBody)
$filter = $HTML.getElementsByClassName($htmlClassName)

With some URLs I experienced that the $filter variable was empty while it was populated for other URLs. All in all this might work for your situation but it seems like Powershell isn't the way to go for more complex parsing.

Answer 2

In 2020 with PowerShell 5+ you do it like this:

$searchClass = "banana" <# in this example we parse all elements of class "banana" but you can use any class name you wish #>
$myURI = "url.com" <# replace url.com with any website you want to scrape from #>

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12 <# using TLS 1.2 is vitally important #>
$req = Invoke-Webrequest -URI $myURI
$req.ParsedHtml.getElementsByClassName($searchClass) | %{Write-Host $_.innerhtml}

#for extra credit we can parse all the links
$req.ParsedHtml.getElementsByTagName('a') | %{Write-Host $_.href} #outputs all the links