
Lucas Mitchell
Automation Engineer

Your friendly guide to scraping websites, handling CAPTCHAs, and even taking screenshots!

C# isn’t just for building Windows apps or games—it’s a powerhouse for web scraping too! With libraries like HtmlAgilityPack, Selenium, and Puppeteer Sharp, you can extract data, automate interactions, and even solve CAPTCHAs (yes, really). In this tutorial, we’ll use https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ as our playground. Let’s dive in!

First, create a new C# console app. Then, install these NuGet packages:
Install-Package HtmlAgilityPack # For HTML parsing
Install-Package Selenium.WebDriver # For browser automation
Install-Package PuppeteerSharp # For screenshots & advanced scraping
Install-Package Capsolver.SDK # For CAPTCHA solving
Let’s scrape country data from https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/simple/.
using HtmlAgilityPack;
using System.Net;
var url = "https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/simple/";
var client = new WebClient();
client.Headers.Add("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0"); // Be polite!
var html = client.DownloadString(url);
var doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(html);
var countries = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//div[@class='country']");
foreach (var country in countries)
{
var name = country.SelectSingleNode(".//h3").InnerText.Trim();
var capital = country.SelectSingleNode(".//span[@class='country-capital']").InnerText.Trim();
Console.WriteLine($"Country: {name}, Capital: {capital}");
}
This prints all countries and their capitals. Simple, right?
Some pages need a real browser. Let’s scrape the AJAX example page using Selenium:
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
var options = new ChromeOptions();
options.AddArgument("--headless"); // Run in background
using var driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/");
var dynamicContent = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector(".ajax-content")).Text;
Console.WriteLine($"AJAX Content: {dynamicContent}");
Got a CAPTCHA blocking your way? Use CapSolver to bypass ReCaptchaV2. Here’s how:
using System;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.Json;
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using System.Threading;
namespace CapSolverSeleniumExample
{
class Program
{
static async Task Main(string[] args)
{
string token = await GetCaptchaToken();
using var driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.example.com");
Thread.Sleep(5000);
driver.ExecuteScript("document.getElementById('g-recaptcha-response').innerHTML = arguments[0];", token);
var submitButton = driver.FindElement(By.Id("submit-button"));
submitButton.Click();
Thread.Sleep(5000);
driver.Quit();
}
static async Task<string> GetCaptchaToken()
{
string apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY";
string siteKey = "6Le-wvkSAAAAAPBMRTvw0Q4Muexq9bi0DJwx_kl-";
string siteUrl = "https://www.example.com";
using var client = new HttpClient();
var payload = new
{
clientKey = apiKey,
task = new
{
type = "ReCaptchaV3TaskProxyLess",
websiteKey = siteKey,
websiteURL = siteUrl,
pageAction = "login"
}
};
var requestContent = new StringContent(JsonSerializer.Serialize(payload), Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");
var createTaskResponse = await client.PostAsync("https://api.capsolver.com/createTask", requestContent);
var createTaskResponseString = await createTaskResponse.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
using var createTaskJsonDoc = JsonDocument.Parse(createTaskResponseString);
var root = createTaskJsonDoc.RootElement;
if (!root.TryGetProperty("taskId", out var taskIdElement))
{
Console.WriteLine("Failed to create task: " + createTaskResponseString);
return null;
}
int taskId = taskIdElement.GetInt32();
while (true)
{
await Task.Delay(1000);
var resultPayload = new { clientKey = apiKey, taskId = taskId };
var resultContent = new StringContent(JsonSerializer.Serialize(resultPayload), Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");
var getTaskResponse = await client.PostAsync("https://api.capsolver.com/getTaskResult", resultContent);
var getTaskResponseString = await getTaskResponse.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
using var getTaskJsonDoc = JsonDocument.Parse(getTaskResponseString);
var resultRoot = getTaskJsonDoc.RootElement;
if (resultRoot.TryGetProperty("status", out var statusElement))
{
string status = statusElement.GetString();
if (status == "ready")
{
if (resultRoot.TryGetProperty("solution", out var solutionElement) && solutionElement.TryGetProperty("gRecaptchaResponse", out var tokenElement))
{
return tokenElement.GetString();
}
return null;
}
if (status == "failed" || resultRoot.TryGetProperty("errorId", out _))
{
Console.WriteLine("Solve failed! response: " + getTaskResponseString);
return null;
}
}
}
}
}
}
Works seamlessly with Selenium to automate CAPTCHA-heavy forms!
Want visual proof of your scraping? Capture a screenshot:
using PuppeteerSharp;
await new BrowserFetcher().DownloadAsync();
using var browser = await Puppeteer.LaunchAsync(new LaunchOptions { Headless = true });
using var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();
await page.GoToAsync("https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/javascript/");
await page.ScreenshotAsync("screenshot.png");
Perfect for debugging or archiving pages.
Thread.Sleep(2000) to avoid overwhelming servers.try-catch blocks for network issues.Discover the best AI for solving image puzzles. Learn how CapSolver's Vision Engine and ImageToText APIs automate complex visual challenges with high accuracy.

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