How to set custom “Host” header in HttpWebRequest?

Question

How can I set a custom Host header in HttpWebRequest? I know that normally this class doesn\'t allow you to do so but is there anyway to use reflection or something like tha

Answer 1

You can use this hack, designed for solve this problem in .Net 3.5 .

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


namespace ConsoleApplication6
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://198.252.206.16");

            FieldInfo headersFieldInfo =  request.GetType().GetField("_HttpRequestHeaders", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic
                                                    | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance
                                                    | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.GetField);

            CusteredHeaderCollection WssHeaders = new CusteredHeaderCollection("stackoverflow.com");

            headersFieldInfo.SetValue(request, WssHeaders);

            request.Proxy = null;
            HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            string result = sr.ReadToEnd();
            Console.WriteLine(result);
            Console.ReadLine();

        }
        public class CusteredHeaderCollection : WebHeaderCollection
        {
            public bool HostHeaderValueReplaced { get;private  set; }

            public string ClusterUrl { get; private set; }

            public CusteredHeaderCollection(string commonClusterUrl) : base()
            {
                if (string.IsNullOrEmpty("commonClusterUrl"))
                    throw new ArgumentNullException("commonClusterUrl");

                this.ClusterUrl = commonClusterUrl;
            }

            public override string ToString()
            {
                this["Host"] = this.ClusterUrl;
                string tmp =  base.ToString();
                this.HostHeaderValueReplaced = true;

                return tmp;
            }

        }
    }
}