file io - C#: Writing a CookieContainer to Disk and Loading Back In For Use

Question

I have a CookieContainer extracted from a HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse session named CookieJar. I want my application to store cookies between runs, so cookies collected in the CookieContainer on one run of the program will be used the next run, too.

I think the way to do this would be to somehow write the contents of a CookieContainer to disk. My question is:

• How can you write a CookieContainer to the disk? Are there built-in functions for this, or, if not, what are the approaches people have taken? Are there any classes available for simplifying this?
• Once you've written a CookieContainer to the disk, how do you load it back in for use?

UPDATE: The first answer has suggested serialization of the CookieContainer. However, I am not very familiar with how to serialize and deserialize such complex objects. Could you provide some sample code? The suggestion was to utilise SOAPFormatter.

Answer 1

This problem was bugging me for ages, nothing I could find worked. I worked it out, so putting that information out into the world.

Answer using BinaryFormatter:

    public static void WriteCookiesToDisk(string file, CookieContainer cookieJar)
    {
        using(Stream stream = File.Create(file))
        {
            try {
                Console.Out.Write("Writing cookies to disk... ");
                BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
                formatter.Serialize(stream, cookieJar);
                Console.Out.WriteLine("Done.");
            } catch(Exception e) { 
                Console.Out.WriteLine("Problem writing cookies to disk: " + e.GetType()); 
            }
        }
    }   

    public static CookieContainer ReadCookiesFromDisk(string file)
    {

        try {
            using(Stream stream = File.Open(file, FileMode.Open))
            {
                Console.Out.Write("Reading cookies from disk... ");
                BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
                Console.Out.WriteLine("Done.");
                return (CookieContainer)formatter.Deserialize(stream);
            }
        } catch(Exception e) { 
            Console.Out.WriteLine("Problem reading cookies from disk: " + e.GetType()); 
            return new CookieContainer(); 
        }
    }