Visual Basic Web Scraping: A Comprehensive Tutorial for 2025

I’ll walk you through setting up your environment and building a functional scraper. I’ll also cover some of the tools and techniques you’ll need to scrape data from real websites. By the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to get started with web scraping in Visual Basic.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from websites. Typically, the data is gathered by sending HTTP requests to web pages, retrieving the HTML source code, and then parsing that code to extract useful information. This can include anything from product prices on an e-commerce site to blog post titles or company contact information.

Many developers prefer languages like Python or JavaScript because of their extensive ecosystems and libraries tailored to web scraping tasks. However, Visual Basic can be a practical choice, especially for those familiar with the language and the .NET framework.

Need to Scrape JavaScript-Heavy or Protected Sites?

While Visual Basic combined with HtmlAgilityPack is great for static content, it can struggle with JavaScript-heavy pages or sites protected by anti-bot systems. If you’re scraping at scale or need to handle dynamic content, consider using a tool like a Scraping Browser. It’s a fully managed browser automation solution that handles JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and IP rotation — without the need to manage headless browsers yourself.

This can be a helpful alternative when Visual Basic or .NET-based tools hit limitations with modern websites.

Why Use Visual Basic for Web Scraping?

There are several reasons why Visual Basic can be a great choice for web scraping:

1. Simple Syntax: Visual Basic offers an intuitive and easy-to-understand syntax, which is great for those who are just starting with web scraping.
2. Interoperability with .NET: Visual Basic integrates seamlessly with the .NET ecosystem, allowing you to use powerful .NET libraries like the Html Agility Pack (HAP), which is popular for HTML parsing.
3. Mature IDEs: Visual Basic is supported by strong development environments like Visual Studio, which come with robust debugging, testing, and productivity tools.
4. Compatibility with Modern Libraries: You can use Visual Basic alongside other advanced tools like PuppeteerSharp to handle JavaScript-heavy websites, making it versatile for various scraping tasks.

While Visual Basic may not be the first language that comes to mind for web scraping, it is capable of achieving great results, especially when combined with libraries and tools that enhance its functionality.

Setting Up Your Visual Basic Environment

Before you begin writing a web scraper, you need to set up your development environment. This includes installing .NET, choosing an IDE, and adding necessary libraries.

Step 1: Install .NET SDK

Visual Basic works with the .NET framework, so you will need to install the latest version of the .NET SDK. As of 2025, the recommended version is .NET 8.0. You can download the .NET SDK from the official Microsoft website and follow the installation instructions.

Step 2: Choose Your IDE

To write and run your Visual Basic scripts, you will need an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The most popular option is Visual Studio, which provides comprehensive support for .NET languages. You can download the free Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition for Windows or macOS.

If you prefer a lighter IDE, Visual Studio Code with the .NET extensions can be a great alternative. It is lightweight, fast, and supports all the features you need for Visual Basic development.

Step 3: Install Necessary Libraries

Web scraping in Visual Basic typically requires a few external libraries. One of the most useful libraries for HTML parsing is Html Agility Pack (HAP). You will also need the HtmlAgilityPack.CssSelectors library to work with CSS selectors, which simplifies the process of extracting data from HTML elements.

To install these libraries, use the following commands in your terminal:

dotnet add package HtmlAgilityPack
dotnet add package HtmlAgilityPack.CssSelectors

Additionally, if you plan to export your scraped data to a CSV file, the CsvHelper library is essential. You can install it using:

dotnet add package CsvHelper

With these libraries installed, you are ready to start writing your Visual Basic web scraper.

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Web Scraper

Now that your environment is set up, let’s walk through building a web scraper from scratch.

Step 1: Create a New Visual Basic Project

Open your terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to create your project, and run the following command:

dotnet new console - framework net8.0 - language VB

This will create a new console application in Visual Basic targeting the .NET 8.0 framework. Open the newly created folder in your preferred IDE (like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code).

In the Program.vb file, you will see a simple “Hello World!” program. This is where you will begin adding your web scraping code.

Step 2: Install and Import HtmlAgilityPack

To scrape a website, you need to download and parse the HTML content of the target page. This is where HtmlAgilityPack comes into play. In your Program.vb file, add the following import statement at the top of the file:

Imports HtmlAgilityPack

Now, create an instance of HtmlWeb to load a webpage:

Dim web As New HtmlWeb()
Dim document = web.Load("https://www.example.com")

This will load the HTML content of the target webpage into an HtmlDocument object.

Step 3: Extract Data from the Web Page

Once you have the HTML document, you can use various methods to extract specific elements. The simplest way to locate elements is by using XPath or CSS Selectors. For this tutorial, we will use CSS Selectors to select elements like product names, prices, and URLs.

To install the necessary CSS selector extension, run the following command in your terminal:

dotnet add package HtmlAgilityPack.CssSelectors

Now, in your Program.vb file, you can query the HTML document for specific elements. For example, if you want to extract the name and price of a product from a list of product elements, you can use the QuerySelector method:

Dim productHTMLElement = document.DocumentNode.QuerySelector("li.product")
Dim name = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector("h2").InnerText)
Dim price = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector(".price").InnerText)

This code will select the first product element on the page, extract the product name, and its price.

Step 4: Loop Through Multiple Products

To scrape multiple products from the page, use the QuerySelectorAll method, which returns all matching elements. You can then loop through them and extract the required data.

Dim productHTMLElements = document.DocumentNode.QuerySelectorAll("li.product")
For Each productHTMLElement In productHTMLElements
Dim name = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector("h2").InnerText)
Dim price = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector(".price").InnerText)
Console.WriteLine("Product Name: " & name)
Console.WriteLine("Product Price: " & price)
Console.WriteLine()
Next

This loop will iterate over all the product elements and print out the name and price for each product.

Step 5: Store the Scraped Data

Now that you’ve scraped the data, you might want to store it for further analysis. One popular way to store scraped data is in a CSV file.

To export the data to a CSV file, first define a Product class to hold the scraped information:

Public Class Product
Public Property Name As String
Public Property Price As String
End Class
Then, create a list of Product objects and add the scraped data to the list:
Dim products As New List(Of Product)()
For Each productHTMLElement In productHTMLElements
Dim name = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector("h2").InnerText)
Dim price = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(productHTMLElement.QuerySelector(".price").InnerText)
products.Add(New Product With {.Name = name, .Price = price})
Next
Finally, use the CsvHelper library to write the data to a CSV file:
Using writer As New StreamWriter("products.csv")
Using csv As New CsvWriter(writer, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)
csv.WriteRecords(products)
End Using
End Using

Step 6: Run Your Scraper

At this point, your Visual Basic web scraper should be fully functional. Run the script using:

dotnet run

After the script completes, you should see a products.csv file in your project folder containing the scraped product data.

Advanced Techniques for Web Scraping

Now that you’ve built a basic web scraper, let’s explore some advanced techniques to handle more complex scenarios.

Web Crawling: Scraping Multiple Pages

Many websites paginate their content, meaning you’ll need to scrape multiple pages to gather all the data. This process is known as web crawling. You can implement web crawling in Visual Basic by following these steps:

1. Identify Pagination Links: First, identify the pagination links on the page (e.g., “Next”, “Previous”, or page numbers).
2. Queue the Pages: Use a queue to store the URLs of the pages to scrape. Start by adding the URL of the first page.
3. Scrape the Pages: Dequeue a URL, load the page, extract the data, and look for new pagination links to add to the queue.

Avoiding Detection

Web scraping can sometimes trigger anti-bot measures. To avoid detection, you can set a User-Agent header that mimics a real browser. You can also use proxies to rotate IP addresses, reducing the risk of getting blocked.

Dim userAgent As String = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
web.UserAgent = userAgent

By setting a User-Agent header and using proxies, you can make your web scraping scripts harder to detect.

Handling JavaScript-Heavy Pages

If the page you are scraping relies on JavaScript to load content, you may need to use a headless browser like PuppeteerSharp. This tool allows you to control a headless browser to render the page and execute JavaScript before extracting the data.

dotnet add package PuppeteerSharp

PuppeteerSharp is a powerful library for handling JavaScript-heavy pages and scraping dynamic content.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve covered everything you need to get started with web scraping using Visual Basic. From setting up your development environment to writing a fully functional web scraper, you now have the tools to extract valuable data from websites.

Remember, while Visual Basic may not be the most popular choice for web scraping, its simplicity makes it an excellent option for building scrapers. By following this guide and exploring advanced techniques like web crawling and JavaScript rendering, you can create sophisticated scraping tools for a wide range of use cases. Happy scraping!