How to Create a Program to Login to Twitter in Visual Basic

Submitted by Yorkiebar on Monday, October 7, 2013 - 06:10.

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Introduction: Welcome to a tutorial on how to create a simple program to login to Twitter. This bot will not do anything other than login so you must know bot basics to carry on for performing actions. Steps of Creation: Step 1: I have created a simple form with just a button1 which is used for starting the process; Textbox1 to contain the username/email and Textbox2 for the password. You will also want to import the following...

Imports System.IO
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Net
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions

Step 2: So... first we want to set a function called getBetween to produce a String between two points within another string. We also want to make a function to get a token from Twitter's login page...

Private Function GetBetween(ByVal Source As String, ByVal Str1 As String, ByVal Str2 As String, Optional ByVal Index As Integer = 0) As String
    Return Regex.Split(Regex.Split(Source, Str1)(Index + 1), Str2)(0)
End Function
Private Function getToken()
    Dim r As HttpWebRequest = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.twitter.co.uk")
    Dim re As HttpWebResponse = r.GetResponse()
    Dim src As String = New StreamReader(re.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd()
    Return GetBetween(src, "<input type=""hidden"" name=""authenticity_token"" value=""", """")
End Function

Step 3: Next, we want to set a lot of information to do with Twitter such as the login page, the post data etc. This has to be the same so I won't bother explaining every part of it.

Dim loginCookies As CookieContainer
Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
    Dim token As String = getToken()
    Dim postData As String = "session%5Busername_or_email%5D=" & TextBox1.Text & "&session%5Bpassword%5D=" & TextBox2.Text & "&remember_me=1&return_to_ssl=false&scribe_log=&redirect_after_login=%2F&authenticity_token=" & token
    Dim tempCookies As New CookieContainer
    Dim encoding As New UTF8Encoding
    Dim byteData As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(postData)
     Dim r As HttpWebRequest = DirectCast(HttpWebRequest.Create("https://twitter.com/sessions"), HttpWebRequest)
    r.KeepAlive = True
    r.Method = "POST"
    r.CookieContainer = tempCookies
    r.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
    r.Referer = "https://twitter.com/sessions"
    r.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.69 Safari/537.36"
    r.ContentLength = byteData.Length
    Dim re As Stream = r.GetRequestStream()
    re.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length)
    re.Close()
    Dim res As HttpWebResponse = DirectCast(r.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse)
    tempCookies.Add(res.Cookies)
    loginCookies = tempCookies
    Dim src As String = New StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd()
End Sub

As you can clearly see, the data being sent is setting the textbox1.text to the username/email and textbox2.text to the password. Step 4 Finally we want to check if the returned source code contains "view my profile page", if it does, we're logged in!

If (src.Contains("View my profile page")) Then
        loginCookies = tempCookies
    MsgBox("Success!")
Else
    tempCookies = Nothing
    MsgBox("Failed.")
End If

Project Complete! Below is the full source code and download to the project files.

Imports System.IO
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Net
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
Public Class Form1
    Private Function GetBetween(ByVal Source As String, ByVal Str1 As String, ByVal Str2 As String, Optional ByVal Index As Integer = 0) As String
        Return Regex.Split(Regex.Split(Source, Str1)(Index + 1), Str2)(0)
    End Function
    Dim loginCookies As CookieContainer
    Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Dim token As String = getToken()
        Dim postData As String = "session%5Busername_or_email%5D=" & TextBox1.Text & "&session%5Bpassword%5D=" & TextBox2.Text & "&remember_me=1&return_to_ssl=false&scribe_log=&redirect_after_login=%2F&authenticity_token=" & token
        Dim tempCookies As New CookieContainer
        Dim encoding As New UTF8Encoding
        Dim byteData As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(postData)
 
        Dim r As HttpWebRequest = DirectCast(HttpWebRequest.Create("https://twitter.com/sessions"), HttpWebRequest)
        r.KeepAlive = True
        r.Method = "POST"
        r.CookieContainer = tempCookies
        r.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
        r.Referer = "https://twitter.com/sessions"
        r.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.69 Safari/537.36"
        r.ContentLength = byteData.Length
        Dim re As Stream = r.GetRequestStream()
        re.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length)
        re.Close()
        Dim res As HttpWebResponse = DirectCast(r.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse)
        tempCookies.Add(res.Cookies)
        loginCookies = tempCookies
        Dim src As String = New StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd()
        If (src.Contains("View my profile page")) Then
            loginCookies = tempCookies
            MsgBox("Success!")
        Else
            tempCookies = Nothing
            MsgBox("Failed.")
        End If
    End Sub
 
    Private Function getToken()
        Dim r As HttpWebRequest = HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.twitter.co.uk")
        Dim re As HttpWebResponse = r.GetResponse()
        Dim src As String = New StreamReader(re.GetResponseStream()).ReadToEnd()
        Return GetBetween(src, "<input type=""hidden"" name=""authenticity_token"" value=""", """")
    End Function
End Class

Note: Due to the size or complexity of this submission, the author has submitted it as a .zip file to shorten your download time. After downloading it, you will need a program like Winzip to decompress it.

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FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE:

1. Re-scan downloaded files using your personal virus checker before using it.
2. NEVER, EVER run compiled files (.exe's, .ocx's, .dll's etc.)--only run source code.

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