How to get value of a link from a website with powershell? - powershell

Question

I want to get download URL of the last version of GIMP from it's site ,I wrote a script but it returns the link name I do not know how to get the value
$web = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/"
$web.Links | Where-Object href -like '*exe' | select -Last 1 | select -expand href
the above code returne link name (gimp-2.10.32-setup.exe)
but I need the value ("https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/gimp-2.10.32-setup.exe")
can someone guide me how to do it

Answer 1

You know that the url presented is relative.
Just append the root part of the URL yourself.
$Uri = 'https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/'
$web = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri
$ExeRelLink = $web.Links | Where-Object href -like '*exe' | select -Last 1 -expand href
# Here is your download link.
$DownloadLink = $Uri + $ExeRelLink
Additional Note
You can combine the -Last and -Expand from your 2 select statements into 1.

Answer 2

There are several downloads sites with exactly the same or very similar layout to this GIMP page, including many Apache projects like Tomcat and ActiveMQ. I had written a little function to parse these and other pages in the past, and interestingly it also worked for this GIMP page. I thought it was worth sharing as such.
Function Extract-FilenameFromWebsite {
[cmdletbinding()]
Param(
[parameter(Position=0,ValueFromPipeline)]
$Url
)
begin{
$pattern = '<a href.+">(?<FileName>.+?\..+?)</a>\s+(?<Date>\d+-.+?)\s{2,}(?<Size>\d+\w)?'
}
process{
$website = Invoke-WebRequest $Url -UseBasicParsing
switch -Regex ($website.Content -split '\r?\n'){
$pattern {
[PSCustomObject]#{
FileName = $matches.FileName
URL = '{0}{1}' -f $Url,$matches.FileName
LastModified = [datetime]$matches.Date
Size = $matches.Size
}
}
}
}
}
It's assumed the site passed in has a trailing slash. If you want to account for either, you can add this simple line to the process block.
if($Url -notmatch '/$'){$Url = "$Url/"}
To get the latest version, call the function like this
$url = 'https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/'
$latest = Extract-FilenameFromWebsite -Url $Url | Where-Object filename -like '*exe' |
Sort-Object LastModified | Select-Object -Last 1
$latest.url
Or you could expand the property while retrieving
$url = 'https://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.10/windows/'
$latesturl = Extract-FilenameFromWebsite -Url $Url | Where-Object filename -like '*exe' |
Sort-Object LastModified | Select-Object -Last 1 -ExpandProperty URL
$latesturl