How to read a file from internet?

Question

simple question: I have an file online (txt). How to read it and check if its there? (C#.net 2.0)

Answer 1

an alternative to HttpWebRequest is WebClient

    // create a new instance of WebClient
    WebClient client = new WebClient();

    // set the user agent to IE6
    client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
    try
    {
        // actually execute the GET request
        string ret = client.DownloadString("http://www.google.com/");

        // ret now contains the contents of the webpage
        Console.WriteLine("First 256 bytes of response: " + ret.Substring(0,265));
    }
    catch (WebException we)
    {
        // WebException.Status holds useful information
        Console.WriteLine(we.Message + "\n" + we.Status.ToString());
    }
    catch (NotSupportedException ne)
    {
        // other errors
        Console.WriteLine(ne.Message);
    }

example from http://www.daveamenta.com/2008-05/c-webclient-usage/