Get Web Page Contents in Code with C#

Contributor Icon Contributed by johnnythawte  
Tag Icon Tagged: C programming  

When you are developing an application that needs to access data stored on a web server, you can easily get the contents of a web page with this simple C# function.


The .NET framework provides a rich set of methods to access data stored on the web. First you will have to include the right namespaces:
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

The HttpWebRequest object allows us to create a request to the URL, and the WebResponse allows us to read the response to the request.

We’ll use a StreamReader object to read the response into a string variable.

Here’s the actual code:

HttpWebRequest myRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);
myRequest.Method = "GET";
WebResponse myResponse = myRequest.GetResponse();
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(myResponse.GetResponseStream(), System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
string result = sr.ReadToEnd();
sr.Close();
myResponse.Close();

In this code sample, the URL variable should contain the URL that you want to get, and the result variable will contain the contents of the web page. You may want to add some error handling as well for a real application.

 

13 Comments -


  1. sagiv said on December 5, 2008

    thank’s a lot!!! it really helped!

  2. luis said on December 29, 2008

    Thanks

  3. bas said on January 5, 2009

    thanks,
    just wat i needed

  4. Laotuongrobo said on June 29, 2009

    I had do it.. but have a problems : The remote name could not be resolved: ‘http://www.yahoo.com’
    Please help!

  5. Anonymous said on August 27, 2009

    Thanks ! a lot sir

  6. Cody Cooper said on November 6, 2009

    thanks so much

  7. Anonymous said on April 8, 2010

    Thanks. It’s useful for me :)

  8. Qibo Zhang said on July 14, 2010

    I love the code sample! It is simple but very useful!

    How to code if remote server requires usename and password?

    Thanks!

  9. Mtouseef Zafar said on February 10, 2011

    nice

  10. Hooma said on August 23, 2011

    the webrequest.create work just fine in a console application , but in winodws applications i encounter the error which says :
    The type or namespace name ‘Create’ does not exist in the namespace ‘WebRequest’ (are you missing an assembly reference?)
    can someone help me with that

  11. hamed said on September 22, 2011

    hi,
    thanks, but:
    what if you want to extract text content of this URL which don’t contains html tags ?

  12. hosein said on November 5, 2011

    hi,
    It was so useful and exactly what I looking for.
    by the way, it’s very optimized code.

    thanks.

  13. Kevin said on January 4, 2012

    Worked great. Thanks!

 

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