How can I get a web site's favicon?

Question

Simple enough question: I\'ve created a small app that is basically just a favourites that sits in my system tray so that I can open often-used sites/folders/files from the

Answer 1

The first thing to look for is /favicon.ico in the site root; something like WebClient.DownloadFile() should do fine. However, you can also set the icon in metadata - for SO this is:

and note that alternative icons might be available; the "touch" one tends to be bigger and higher res, for example:

so you would parse that in either the HTML Agility Pack or XmlDocument (if xhtml) and use WebClient.DownloadFile()

Here's some code I've used to obtain this via the agility pack:

var favicon = "/favicon.ico";
var el=root.SelectSingleNode("/html/head/link[@rel='shortcut icon' and @href]");
if (el != null) favicon = el.Attributes["href"].Value;

Note the icon is theirs, not yours.