Use Excel as a network packet sniffer?

[KR]

I'm way out of my league, but looking to learn.

My PC communicates with an internet server, generating network traffic from
the server to my PC that drives a graphical (game) interface that I can't
copy relevant data from (I'm interested in tags that describe the graphics
objects).

Since I can't grab my data from within the program itself, and it is labor
intensive to copy it all out one element at a time by hand (switching
between programs to do so), I was thinking I could grab the network packets
in Excel, then parse to get the actual elements I need.

Can anyone point me to resources that would provide information on how to do
this? I can't use Excel to control the data, so I'd just have Excel open in
the background, grabbing packets that contain data that meets certain
criteria, and pop it into cells.

Essentially, trying to create an inventory of what each of my characters
has, without hand-transcribing literally thousands of tags.

Thanks!
KR

 

[RB Smissaert]

Why not try one of the free packet sniffers, export the data to text, import
into Excel and take it from there?

RBS

 

[KR]

I've done a lot in Excel, but nothing network related- I didn't even know
there were free sniffers out there. I'll do a search and see what I can come
up with.

Thanks,
Keith

 

[RB Smissaert]

I have used this one:
http://www.ethereal.com/
and it works well.

RBS

 

[RB Smissaert]

If you want you can run it with parameters, so you could code it all from
VBA if you wanted.

RBS