Read text from response

Question

HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(\"http://google.com\") as HttpWebRequest;  

request.Accept = \"application/xrds+xml\";  
HttpWebResponse response = (Http         


        

Answer 1

The accepted answer does not correctly dispose the WebResponse or decode the text. Also, there's a new way to do this in .NET 4.5.

To perform an HTTP GET and read the response text, do the following.

.NET 1.1 ‒ 4.0

public static string GetResponseText(string address)
{
    var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(address);

    using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
    {
        var encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(response.CharacterSet);

        using (var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
        using (var reader = new StreamReader(responseStream, encoding))
            return reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

.NET 4.5

private static readonly HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();

public static async Task GetResponseText(string address)
{
    return await httpClient.GetStringAsync(address);
}