Is WebRequest The Right C# Tool For Interacting With Websites?

c# .net webrequest
Lee picture Lee · Sep 18, 2008 · Viewed 36.7k times · Source

I'm writing a small tool in C# which will need to send and receive data to/from a website using POST and json formatting. I've never done anything like this before in C# (or any language really) so I'm struggling to find some useful information to get me started.

I've found some information on the WebRequest class in C# (specifically from here) but before I start diving into it, I wondered if this was the right tool for the job.

I've found plenty of tools to convert data into the json format but not much else, so any information would be really helpful here in case I end up down a dead end.

Answer

Wolfwyrd picture Wolfwyrd · Sep 18, 2008

WebRequest and more specifically the HttpWebRequest class is a good starting point for what you want to achieve. To create the request you will use the WebRequest.Create and cast the created request to an HttpWebRequest to actually use it. You will then create your post data and send it to the stream like:

HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)
WebRequest.Create("http://mysite.com/index.php");
req.Method = "POST";
req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
string postData = "var=value1&var2=value2";
req.ContentLength = postData.Length;

StreamWriter stOut = new
StreamWriter(req.GetRequestStream(),
System.Text.Encoding.ASCII);
stOut.Write(postData);
stOut.Close();

Similarly you can read the response back by using the GetResponse method which will allow you to read the resultant response stream and do whatever else you need to do. You can find more info on the class at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httpwebrequest.aspx

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