Invoke-WebRequest freezes / hangs

Question

Why does the cmdlet "Invoke-WebRequest" freezes / hangs on certains URLs? Any workaround possible? I want to access the "span" objects for a given webpage and this cmdlet would be very useful if it didn't hang like that.

For example, this hangs:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download/"

This doesn't :

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://www.microsoft.com/fr-ca/"

-UseBasicParsing makes it run but I want to use the functionality of what Invoke-WebRequest returns without basic parsing because with basic parsing, the span field i'm trying to extract is not populated.

Answer 1

This seems to still be a bug in powershell

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/2867

A possible work around is to convert the item into parsed HTML manually

Function ConvertTo-NormalHTML {
    param([Parameter(Mandatory = $true, ValueFromPipeline = $true)]$HTML)

    $NormalHTML = New-Object -Com "HTMLFile"
    $NormalHTML.IHTMLDocument2_write($HTML.RawContent)
    return $NormalHTML
}

$Content = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://cloud.google.com/chrome-enterprise/browser/download" -UseBasicParsing ).Content

$ParsedHTML = ConvertTo-NormalHTML -HTML $Content

$ParsedHTML