How to read HTTP header from response using .NET HttpWebRequest API?

Ryan Alford picture Ryan Alford · Mar 3, 2010 · Viewed 44.8k times · Source

My app currently uses OAuth to communicate with the Twitter API. Back in December, Twitter upped the rate limit for OAuth to 350 requests per hour. However, I am not seeing this. I am still getting 150 from the account/rate_limit_status method.

I was told that I needed to use the X-RateLimit-Limit HTTP header to get the new rate limit. However, in my code, I do not see that header.

Here is my code...

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(newURL);
request.Method = "GET";
request.ServicePoint.Expect100Continue = false;
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
{
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
    {
        responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

If I inspect the response, I can see that it has a property for Headers, and that there are 16 headers. However, I do not have X-RateLimit-Limit in the list.

Image
(source: yfrog.com)

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Answer

Russ Clarke picture Russ Clarke · Mar 3, 2010

You should simple be able to use:

using (WebResponse response = request.GetResponse())
{
  string limit = response.Headers["X-RateLimit-Limit"];
  ...
}

If that doesn't work as expected, you can do a watch on response.Headers and see what's in there.