VBA - Find preceding html tag

excel, html, vba

Solution

This should do it

Text_1 = htm.getElementById("book-info").innerhtml
if instr(1, text_1, "MMC_ID ", vbTextCompare) > 0 then
   numb_spans = htm.getElementById("book-info").getElementsByTagName("span").length
   ExtractedText = htm.getElementById("book-info").getElementsByTagName("span")(-1 + numb_spans).innerText
else
end if

Problem

Say I have HTML source that looks like this ``` <div id="book-info"> <span class="title">Weather</span> <span class="title">Title Of Book</span> <p><a href="http://test.com?MMC_ID=34343">Buy Now</a></p> </div> ``` What I need returned is "Title Of Book" There are numerous instances of span class="title" but the one I need immediately precedes the only MMC_ID tag on the page, so I can use MMC_ID as a marker to get close to the span tag I need. Question: How can I say "Grab the contents of the very first span tag to the left of MMC_ID? The below code works sometimes, but there is a variable number of span tags on the page so it fails when that deviation occurs. ``` With CreateObject("msxml2.xmlhttp") .Open "GET", ActiveCell.Offset(0, -1).Value, False .Send htm.body.innerhtml = .ResponseText End With ExtractedText = htm.getElementById("book-info").getElementsByTagName("span")(1).innerText ```

Original source