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

The code below is taken off the HttpValueCollection implementation of ToString, via ILSpy, which gives you a name=value querystring.

Unfortunately HttpValueCollection is an internal class which you only ever get back if you use HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(). I removed all the viewstate parts to it, and it encodes by default:

public static class HttpExtensions
{
    public static string ToQueryString(this NameValueCollection collection)
    {
        // This is based off the NameValueCollection.ToString() implementation
        int count = collection.Count;
        if (count == 0)
            return string.Empty;

        StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
        {
            string text = collection.GetKey(i);
            text = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text);
            string value = (text != null) ? (text + "=") : string.Empty;
            string[] values = collection.GetValues(i);
            if (stringBuilder.Length > 0)
            {
                stringBuilder.Append('&');
            }
            if (values == null || values.Length == 0)
            {
                stringBuilder.Append(value);
            }
            else
            {
                if (values.Length == 1)
                {
                    stringBuilder.Append(value);
                    string text2 = values[0];
                    text2 = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text2);
                    stringBuilder.Append(text2);
                }
                else
                {
                    for (int j = 0; j < values.Length; j++)
                    {
                        if (j > 0)
                        {
                            stringBuilder.Append('&');
                        }
                        stringBuilder.Append(value);
                        string text2 = values[j];
                        text2 = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text2);
                        stringBuilder.Append(text2);
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        return stringBuilder.ToString();
    }
}