How to build a query string for a URL in C#?

Question

A common task when calling web resources from a code is building a query string to including all the necessary parameters. While by all means no rocket science, there are so

Answer 1

With the inspiration from Roy Tinker's comment, I ended up using a simple extension method on the Uri class that keeps my code concise and clean:

using System.Web;

public static class HttpExtensions
{
    public static Uri AddQuery(this Uri uri, string name, string value)
    {
        var httpValueCollection = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(uri.Query);

        httpValueCollection.Remove(name);
        httpValueCollection.Add(name, value);

        var ub = new UriBuilder(uri);
        ub.Query = httpValueCollection.ToString();

        return ub.Uri;
    }
}

Usage:

Uri url = new Uri("http://localhost/rest/something/browse").
          AddQuery("page", "0").
          AddQuery("pageSize", "200");

---

Edit - Standards compliant variant

As several people pointed out, httpValueCollection.ToString() encodes Unicode characters in a non-standards-compliant way. This is a variant of the same extension method that handles such characters by invoking HttpUtility.UrlEncode method instead of the deprecated HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode method.

using System.Web;

public static Uri AddQuery(this Uri uri, string name, string value)
{
    var httpValueCollection = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(uri.Query);

    httpValueCollection.Remove(name);
    httpValueCollection.Add(name, value);

    var ub = new UriBuilder(uri);

    // this code block is taken from httpValueCollection.ToString() method
    // and modified so it encodes strings with HttpUtility.UrlEncode
    if (httpValueCollection.Count == 0)
        ub.Query = String.Empty;
    else
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < httpValueCollection.Count; i++)
        {
            string text = httpValueCollection.GetKey(i);
            {
                text = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text);

                string val = (text != null) ? (text + "=") : string.Empty;
                string[] vals = httpValueCollection.GetValues(i);

                if (sb.Length > 0)
                    sb.Append('&');

                if (vals == null || vals.Length == 0)
                    sb.Append(val);
                else
                {
                    if (vals.Length == 1)
                    {
                        sb.Append(val);
                        sb.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode(vals[0]));
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        for (int j = 0; j < vals.Length; j++)
                        {
                            if (j > 0)
                                sb.Append('&');

                            sb.Append(val);
                            sb.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode(vals[j]));
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        ub.Query = sb.ToString();
    }

    return ub.Uri;
}