codinghorror

That’s interesting. The links it builds are in this format:

mhtml:file://C:\Documents and Settings\jya13970\My Documents\My MHTs\Spidersoft - WinMHT Start Page.mht!http://www.spidersoft.com/winmht/start.asp

mhtml:file://C:\Documents and Settings\jya13970\My Documents\My MHTs\Spidersoft - WinMHT Start Page.mht!http://www.spidersoft.com/winmht/default.asp

Hmm. I wasn’t aware of these crazy mhtml:file:// format links and the exclamation points…

I guess if I remapped all the links to that format, you could create one giant MHT that contained all the sub-pages of a website.

I need to also revisit how Firefox deals with this. It is an RFC standard, but last I checked there was a special add-in you needed to view them in FF.

OliverS

Looks great! Now are you going to extend it to be able to put more than one page into the archive?

codinghorror

I don’t think that’s possible… I believe clicked links will always try to resolve a real host and access the network instead of checking the MHT file for the resource. I can run an experiment to see if it will work or not, but I doubt it.

OliverS

Well, WinMHT can definitely do it: http://www.winmht.com

The RFC talks about “subsidiary resources”. Obviously it’s no problem if these are HTML pages again… a multi-page archive, as created with WinMHT, can be opened in IE without problems and the various pages inside can be browsed from the archive if they are interlinked (WinMHT can also create a TOC page).

OliverS

I guess the links are probably relative in the file (otherwise it wouldn’t work as soon as you copy it elsewhere), so part of the links you are showing aren’t really in the file itself. However, would be great if your MhtBuilder could do this!

As for Firefox: it doesn’t support MHT files natively, which strikes some people as funny because actually Thunderbird does. I’m not sure about the exact extent of the support, but it’s definitely possible to view MHT files attached to email directly in the mailer. I looked at this a while ago, but I believe I was able to find a bug tracking entry about this at the time.

David

Can your product possibly pull down linked active pages like ASP? I’m building active content systems with a local server and being able to bundle all the pages as single files would be insanely great! IE’s save as mht will not do that.
Great effort so far, keep up the good work!
David

Kurt_Koller

How can I save stuff from my local disk? I have a report that I’m creating in HTML, and I already have my stuff locally. Any easy way to just “get” the stuff from there and package into an MHT? The image links are all local (img src=“file.png”)…

Thanks

Kurt_Koller

Also, I ran your demo, saved the default codinghorror pages to disk, and tried to open it with Microsoft Word, which told me that it’s not a valid single page archive file.

Kurt_Koller

and as a followup to that, if I save from IE, it works fine in word.

codinghorror

I’m building active content systems with a local server and being able to bundle all the pages as single files would be insanely great! IE’s save as mht will not do that.

Yes, I would like to get to this… eventually… I wasn’t aware it was possible until Oliver pointed out WinMHT.

tried to open it with Microsoft Word

Does it open from IE?

Raj

I am having the same problem as Kurt.

Does it open from IE?
Yep

I want to be able to convert any html page on my web server’s local disk into .mht, rename it to .doc, and be able to open it in word. Any advice?

codinghorror

Well, I never tested Word… it never occurred to me that you could even do this!

arne

hi thx first for the nice app
most sites i tried so far seem to work fine.
But when i try a download (web complete) on a href="http://www.heise.de/"http://www.heise.de//a it crashed after a few seconds.
I assume its a problem cause of invalid filename that it wants to create on the local hdd like “this is a long , filename.txt”

codinghorror

tried to open it with Microsoft Word, which told me that it’s not a valid single page archive file.

I know what this is now. Word is looking for a trailing “–” at the final boundary. So at the very end of the file change this…

codinghorror

But when i try a download (web complete) on http://www.heise.de/ it crashed after a few seconds.

–

The problem with that URL is its insane use of the link tag. Just take a look at the top of the file for all the link elements. Not easy to fix, because I assume most linked elements are embedded. In this case, they’re not at all…

NathanielT

Why would you want to use MHT for anything. It is a Microsoft psuedo-standard, and IE is the the only browser that will open them, so you can forget Linux users, and Mac users, except for those few who have IE for Mac, while Windows my currently be the most widely used OS for normal users, the internet should not be a place where only Windows users are welcome. Considering the flaws in IE, I would loath to build a site that required opening the view up to security holes, just to make life easier for me.

Yes a MHT file can store images and multiple webpages in one file, but so can a tarred or zipped folder, and as far as browsing those pages, the technique is relative links.

codinghorror

It’s not a pseudo-standard, it’s RFC2557 almost verbatim!

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2557.txt

The main benefit is keeping everything in a single file.

Kurt_Koller

Have you patched the code for the word problem? Just curious.

Also yes, this is a standard. There are extensions to firefox to save/read this as well. And a bunch of other things support it as well.

Kyle

I’ve made two code changes to allow for the file to be opened in Word 2003. This made it work for me anyway.

Kyle

In builder.vb starting on line 474 change the procedure to the following:

Private Sub AppendMhtBoundary(Optional ByVal bEndOfFile As Boolean = False)
	AppendMhtLine()
	If bEndOfFile = False Then
		AppendMhtLine("--"  _MimeBoundaryTag)
	Else
		AppendMhtLine("--"  _MimeBoundaryTag  "--")
	End If
End Sub

In builder.vb on line 438, change procedure call to: AppendMhtBoundary(True)

Fred

Is it possible to compile this into a dll, for use in vb6, or just convert the code?

Thanks

TarasT

Any way to apply gzip compression to MHTs?

Gregg

Great idea, thanks.

Have you considered extending this to save in other widely used formats - like perhaps .doc?

Because .MHT doesn’t seem to be that widely/consistently supported yet, I’m a little hesitant about adopting it as a format for collecting/archiving saved content.

So a version that supported the .doc format would be a welcome alternative (IMHO). I know, it’s not a truly open standard… but the OPen Office folks seem to have managed, so perhaps it’s possible?

Texrat

This is a great, great tool and will work perfectly for my intranet reporting project. Thanks Jeff!

Andre

the program is very cool but it seems i must use the comercial versions

what i need is to convert a local file to mht and send this with vb.net built in mail

Andre

Paca

I use Visual Studio 2k5
How create just the simple .mht file? Wtih the headers and etc?

Sean

Hi Jeff,

I have posted a question on The Code Project in regards to my question, but I thought it might be easier to reach you here.

Is this app supposed to loop though the entire site folder and create a mht file for each html file? 1 for 1. It seems to only get the first file it finds, creates an mht (perfectly I might add) but stops there.

I have an intranet that has 12000 files, and the reason I am interested in your app is because I need to convert them into mht, and then upload them into Sharepoint. This then allows suers to view all pages in IE Browser, but edit the pages easily in WORD.

So as you can imagine, a batch process is paramount.

Oh and I was a little confused about why it doesn’t keep the orginal file name, but rather taking on the Page Title instead. Why is that.

Thanks for any help you might have, and this page has some good reading

Sean

Hi Jeff,

Any chance you can just let me know if your script can convert each file on a website (batch style), and I am just doing it wrong, or it only does one file per run. I have a rather fast approaching deadline to get these files converted.

Jadd

Everyone seems to think that only IE can open an mht file, which is incorrect. Opera supports it natively. I believe Firefox has an extension for it somewhere if you’re willing to look for it, download it and keep updating it.

Ian

The problem that really annoys me, is with IE7 (final version), where saving files as MHTML does NOT guarantee that IE7 itself will actually be able to read them from disk!
If anyone has a work-around (apart from using Firefox, or saving as Complete HTML from IE7), let me know! ildotthomasatiinetdotnetdotau

MahbubM

Hi,
Thank you very much for providing this well crafted code. I need to save html as “Web page complete”, “Web page archive”, “Web page as PDF” for an application to backup blogs. Currently I am doing it using your code . What I am interested in is to show the download progress as the web page is being saved. So I was thinking of combining the functions provided in MHT builder into the extended web browser control found at http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/ExtendedWebBrowser.asp.

I would request your help/guidance/indication/criticism on it.

RogerB

I noticed in your list of functionality that it now supports iframes. Do iframes cause issues when trying to save in MHT format?
Thanks!

Jacques

I’ve used your class to make a little application for myself to download and updates episode guides, and it works very nicely except for a couple of urls that only display as text in IE7 once saved as mht files:

http://epguides.com/smallville/

Any ideas?

Jacques

This works great for most sites, but I have found a few where the mht file displays as text only in IE7.

Here is one example: http://epguides.com/smallville/

Any Ideas?

itsky

I have been trying to get your cool mht tool to work with file based urls without much luck (such as file:///C:/App-Dev-2.0/test.htm). I have looked through the code and have added some additional code in the GetUrlData sub in the WebClientEx.vb to account for file based urls:

Dim bFile As Boolean = False
Dim freq As FileWebRequest '= DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(Url), FileWebRequest)
Dim wreq As HttpWebRequest '= DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(Url), HttpWebRequest)

    If LCase(Microsoft.VisualBasic.Left(Url, 8)) = "file:///" Then
        freq = DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(Url), FileWebRequest)
        bFile = True
    Else
        bFile = False
        wreq = DirectCast(WebRequest.Create(Url), HttpWebRequest)
    End If

Everything works fine until it hits the FinializeMht sub in Builder.vb. I get a null exception with Dim sr As New StreamWriter(outputFilePath, False, _HtmlFile.TextEncoding).

Any thoughts?

Thanks so much.

RahulA

Jef all the methods take the url and then convert to mht. A method that takes a string of html and converts it to mht would be an added bonus as well.

Nitin

Hello Jeff,
I have seen your article on CodeProject and from there I was redirected to this URL on CodingHorror for downloading the MhtBuilder 2.0. But I don’t see any link on this CodingHorror http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000249.html to download. Can you pls provide me the link where I can download the code. Also I tried your code available on CodeProject to create the MHT pages. It doesn’t throw an exception and saves the *.mht file but The MHT file will not open in IE7. It shows all the things in plain text format. Is there any issue with MSIE7.0, VS2005, Vista Home Premium. Pls help me.

Thanks in advance.
Nitin

BAA1

Has anyone resolved itsky’s question. I would like to bundle a web page off of the local disk into an mht file. Every solution I have tried (MS Word, IE, Ms Office 2000 web archive add-in) change the relative paths to full paths (file://C:…). It looks like the images get embedded, but the src is still set to the full path, so the links are broken.

amai

How I can get any part (like body, title, images etc) from MHT-file? Have you any example?

Saqib

Hi
Just came across the CodeProject article - precisely what I needed. Compiled fine in VS2008. However, I’m getting a couple of problems which I haven’t been able to debug:

1. It produces an mht file which looks fine in Notepad, but when I open it in IE8 I get a non-descript error message saying the page could not be loaded. Interestingly, when I open an mht file saved by IE, I see the path in the address bar. When I open the generated mht file IE8 rewrites the URL as mht: file://path
2. Less important - if I set it to use a temporary or permenant file, I get an error saying the path is too long - not really an issue, but thought I’d bring it up while I was writing.
   Thanks for creating such a useful library - I’d appreciate any thoughts on why it doesn’t open in IE8 (running Server 2008 with enhanced security disabled). Could things have changed with newer versions of Windows or VS?
   Saqib

BobD

Hi

I really need to work out how to convert a locally stored HTML file to MHT?

If I enter a file path I get an error:

Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Net.FileWebRequest’ to type ‘System.Net.HttpWebRequest’.