Error (HttpWebRequest): Bytes to be written to the stream exceed the Content-Length bytes size specified

Vigs picture Vigs · Sep 12, 2015 · Viewed 14.6k times · Source

I can't seem to figure out why I keep getting the following error:

Bytes to be written to the stream exceed the Content-Length bytes size specified.

at the following line:

writeStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);

This is on a Windows Forms project. If anyone knows what is going on here I would surely owe you one.

    private void Post()
    {


        HttpWebRequest request = null;
        Uri uri = new Uri("xxxxx");
        request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
        request.Method = "POST";
        request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        doc.Load("XMLFile1.xml");
        request.ContentLength = doc.InnerXml.Length;
        using (Stream writeStream = request.GetRequestStream())
        {
            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            byte[] bytes = encoding.GetBytes(doc.InnerXml);
            writeStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
        }
        string result = string.Empty;

        request.ProtocolVersion = System.Net.HttpVersion.Version11;
        request.KeepAlive = false;
        try
        {
            using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
            {
                using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
                {
                    using (System.IO.StreamReader readStream = new System.IO.StreamReader(responseStream, Encoding.UTF8))
                    {
                        result = readStream.ReadToEnd();
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        catch (Exception exp)
        {
            // MessageBox.Show(exp.Message);
        }
    }

Answer

Lakerfield picture Lakerfield · Sep 12, 2015

There are three possible options

  • Fix the ContentLength as described in the answer from @rene

  • Don't set the ContentLength, the HttpWebRequest is buffering the data, and sets the ContentLength automatically

  • Set the SendChunked property to true, and don't set the ContentLength. The request is send chunk encoded to the webserver. (needs HTTP 1.1 and has to be supported by the webserver)

Code:

...
request.SendChunked = true;
using (Stream writeStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{ ... }