Reading data from a website using C#

Question

I have a webpage which has nothing on it except some string(s). No images, no background color or anything, just some plain text which is not really that long in length.

Answer 1

If you're downloading text then I'd recommend using the WebClient and get a streamreader to the text:

        WebClient web = new WebClient();
        System.IO.Stream stream = web.OpenRead("http://www.yoursite.com/resource.txt");
        using (System.IO.StreamReader reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(stream))
        {
            String text = reader.ReadToEnd();
        }

If this is taking a long time then it is probably a network issue or a problem on the web server. Try opening the resource in a browser and see how long that takes. If the webpage is very large, you may want to look at streaming it in chunks rather than reading all the way to the end as in that example. Look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.stream.read.aspx to see how to read from a stream.