Error (HttpWebRequest): Bytes to be written to the stream exceed the Content-Length bytes size specified

Question

I can\'t seem to figure out why I keep getting the following error:

Bytes to be written to the stream exceed the Content-Length bytes size specified.
         


        

Answer 1

The Encoded byte array from your InnerXml might be longer as some characters in an UTF8 encoding take up 2 or 3 bytes for a single character.

Change your code as follows:

    using (Stream writeStream = request.GetRequestStream())
    {
        UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
        byte[] bytes = encoding.GetBytes(doc.InnerXml);
        request.ContentLength = bytes.Length;
        writeStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
    }

To show exactly what is going on, try this in LINQPad:

var s = "é";
s.Length.Dump("string length");
Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s).Length.Dump("array length");

This will output:

 string length: 1 
 array length:  2 

and now use an e without the apostrophe:

var s = "e";
s.Length.Dump("string length");
Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s).Length.Dump("array length");

which will output:

string length: 1 
array length:  1 

So remember: string length and the number of bytes needed for a specific encoding might differ.