Just for fun, I tried to connect to a server using a raw TCP socket connection.
While creating the socket I include tls handshaking into the tuning (at least that’s what I thought). But when testing and trying fine-tune to make it working I found that this might be too hard nut to bite just using pure Basic. Okay, things like SSL/TLS are not particularly easy to understand and especially to implement. Anyhow I couldn’t make it work. When I send a GET request the CloudFront responses:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: CloudFront
Date: Mon, 05 May 2025 17:35:03 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 915
Connection: close
X-Cache: Error from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 837bfbe95037e42cdc86bcbd263354ea.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Amz-Cf-Pop: HEL51-P2
X-Amz-Cf-Id: yVqAjzJX7AXHSr0gTvuj_lwzLF7NUOY0jFl-u123Mk4b-xi6m3CKtg==
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>ERROR: The request could not be satisfied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>400 ERROR</H1>
<H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
<HR noshade size="1px">
Bad request.
We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
<BR clear="all">
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.
<BR clear="all">
<HR noshade size="1px">
<PRE>
Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: yVqAjzJX7AXHSr0gTvuj_lwzLF7NUOY0jFl-u123Mk4b-xi6m3CKtg==
</PRE>
<ADDRESS>
</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>
So I know that at least SSL/TLS handshaking does not work.
Here’s my code:
Sub HttpGet()
Dim socket As Object
Dim connection As Object
Dim server As String
Dim port As Integer
Dim request As String
Dim response As String
Dim tls()
server = "www.arvopaperi.fi"
port = 443
tls = Array(&H16,&H03,&H03,&H00,&HD5,&H01,&H00,&H00,&HD1,&H03,&H03,&H5B,&H8C,&H5A,&H1E,&H7A,&H2D)
socket = createUnoService("com.sun.star.connection.Connector")
connection = socket.connect("socket,host=" & server & ",port=" & port, tls)
Erase tls
request = "GET /api/pages/stocklist/XHEL HTTP/1.1" & chr(10)
request = request & "Host: www.arvopaperi.fi" & chr(10)
request = request & "Accept: application/json" & chr(10)
request = request & "Accept-Encoding: *" & chr(10)
request = request & "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/83.0.4103.116" & chr(10)
request = request & "Connection: keep-alive" & chr(10)
request = request & "Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100" & chr(10)
request = request & "Connection: close"
Dim requestBytes() As Byte
requestBytes = StrConv(request, vbUnicode)
connection.Write(requestBytes)
connection.flush()
Erase requestBytes
Dim responseBytes() As String
Dim size As Long
size = 50000
connection.Read(responseBytes, size)
connection.Close()
Dim i& :For i = 0 To Ubound(responseBytes)
response = response & chr(responseBytes(i))
If responseBytes(i) = 0 Then Exit For
Next i
MsgBox response
Erase response : rsponse = ""
connection = Nothing
socket = Nothing
End Sub
Then I recalled an earlier tuning based on old VBA-tuning that I made a long ago. In the original I used MSXML2.serverXMLHTTP.6.0 object for HTTP request. But I wanted to implement it with LO Basic without any external stuff. I succeed and it was so simple that I couldn’t almost understand how easy it actually was.
Here’s the code that I used to retrieve a json string from the server containing the Helsinki Stock Exchange stock list
Dim URL As String
URL = "https://www.arvopaperi.fi/api/pages/stocklist/XHEL"
Dim response As String
ReDim StrArray() As String
GlobalScope.BasicLibraries.LoadLibrary("ScriptForge")
Set FSO = CreateScriptService("FileSystem")
Dim inputFile As Object
Set inputFile = FSO.OpenTextFile(URL)
response = inputFile.ReadAll()
inputFile.CloseFile()
Set FSO = Nothing
Trying to get that json string using socket is really hard because of any kind of security layers, and the simplest macro you can imagine shows the middle finger to all that’s related to the security of HTTP communication. Think about that! 
