webpage - Reading data from a website using C#

Question

I have a webpage which has nothing on it except some string(s). No images, no background color or anything, just some plain text which is not really that long in length.

I am just wondering, what is the best (by that, I mean fastest and most efficient) way to pass the string in the webpage so that I can use it for something else (e.g. display in a text box)? I know of WebClient, but I'm not sure if it'll do what I want it do and plus I don't want to even try that out even if it did work because the last time I did it took approximately 30 seconds for a simple operation.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The WebClient class should be more than capable of handling the functionality you describe, for example:

System.Net.WebClient wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
byte[] raw = wc.DownloadData("http://www.yoursite.com/resource/file.htm");

string webData = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(raw);

or (further to suggestion from Fredrick in comments)

System.Net.WebClient wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
string webData = wc.DownloadString("http://www.yoursite.com/resource/file.htm");

When you say it took 30 seconds, can you expand on that a little more? There are many reasons as to why that could have happened. Slow servers, internet connections, dodgy implementation etc etc.

You could go a level lower and implement something like this:

HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.yoursite.com/resource/file.htm");

using (StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream(), Encoding.UTF8))
{
    streamWriter.Write(requestData);
}

string responseData = string.Empty;
HttpWebResponse httpResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
using (StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(httpResponse.GetResponseStream()))
{
    responseData = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
}

However, at the end of the day the WebClient class wraps up this functionality for you. So I would suggest that you use WebClient and investigate the causes of the 30 second delay.