how to click an anchor with visual basic

the HTML DOM says that there are two ways of accessing anchor elements in an HTML document.  1) .getElementsByID and 2) cycling through the HTMLDoc.anchors iHTML collection.

Using VBA, I'm trying to write code that will click an anchor (a "a" element right?) given certain conditions and I can't seem to get 2 to work.  I can get 1) to work:

ex.

set elmLink = htmldoc.getelementbyID("-----")
elmLink.click

But this is very case specific and the link I want to click doesn't always have an ID property listed in the source code.  Most often it is an "a" tag, and only has a class and href listed from which to work with.

This is fine, the shown text almost always contains a phrase.  But I can seem to cycle through the anchors in any way.

I've tried:

for each elmLink in htmldoc.getElementsByTagName("a")
  if instr(elmLink.innerText, "[phrase]") then
    elmLink.click
    exit for
  end if
next

and i've tried

for each elmLink in htmldoc.anchors
  if instr(elmLink.innerText, "[phrase]") then
    elmLink.click
    exit for
  end if
next

and i've tried

for i = 0 to UBound(htmldoc.anchors, 2)
  set elmLink = htmldoc.anchors(, i)
  if instr(elmLink.innerText, "[phrase]") then
    elmLink.click
    exit for
  end if
next

..and none of these 3 do anything, the last one doesn't even run without errors.  I guess .anchors([name], [index]) is too ambiguous for me.  Any thoughts?  thx


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    -- kpac

for each is working fine for me in VB6. chances are it's the Instr causing the most problems (aside from the last example, where you try to use UBound on a collection. That will never work.

for Instr you might need to make the comparison case insensitive.

Code: [Select]

If InStr(1,elmLink.innerText, "[phrase]",vbCompareText)>0 Then