Create HTTP post request and receive response using C# console application

Question

I need to post data to a URL (https://somesite.com) to download file in responseStrem based on the parameters I posted. How can I do that using a C# console application?

Answer 1

For this you can simply use the "HttpWebRequest" and "HttpWebResponse" classes in .net.

Below is a sample console app I wrote to demonstrate how easy this is.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace Test
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string url = "www.somewhere.com";       
            string fileName = @"C:\output.file";

            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
            request.Timeout = 5000;

            try
            {
                using (WebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
                {
                    using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write))
                    {
                        byte[] bytes = ReadFully(response.GetResponseStream());

                        stream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (WebException)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Error Occured");
            }
        }

        public static byte[] ReadFully(Stream input)
        {
            byte[] buffer = new byte[16 * 1024];
            using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
            {
                int read;
                while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
                {
                    ms.Write(buffer, 0, read);
                }
                return ms.ToArray();
            }
        }
    }
}

Enjoy!