How to communicate with Google Chrome using C# or Python

Question

I'm developing a software on C# which has to get info from a website which the user opens in chrome, the user has to input some data and then the website returns a list of different items.
What I want is a way to be able to access to the source code of the page in order to get the info, I cant open the web myself as it doesnt show anything because I didnt input any data, so I need to get it directly from chrome.
How can I achieve this ? A chrome extension ? Or can I access to chrome directly from my software ?

Answer 1

Off the top of my head, I don't know any application that gets data directly from an open instance of Chrome. You'd have to write your own Chrome extension.

Alternatively, you can open the web browser from your application initially.

You can look into these libraries for doing so:

• Watin (My personal favourite)
• Selenium
• Awesomium (You'd have to roll out your own UI, it's invisible)
• Cef
• Essential Objects Web Browser

Answer 2

EDIT: I didn't think about using QA tools as the actual browser hook as @TheAnathema mentions. That would probably work for your needs.

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You're going to need to create it as Chrome extension if you must be dependent on the user actually going to a specific web site (i.e. not being able to do the requests yourself with either Selenium or standard web requests in Python).

The reason why a Chrome extension would be required is because think of how bad it could be for any software to easily read the pages you browse. Banking, medical, email, etc. could all be accessed anonymously from any process if Google allowed any outside process to tap into the web page.

Even Chrome extensions have to ask for permission to be able to do what they want, but at least it is software the user knowingly installed and agreed to the permissions.

A quick search yielded this example of modifying a page's HTML with a Chrome extension: https://blog.lateral.io/2016/04/create-chrome-extension-modify-websites-html-css/