How to get webpage title without downloading all the page source

Question

I\'m looking for a method that will allow me to get the title of a webpage and store it as a string.

However all the solutions I have found so far involve downloadin

Answer 1

As the block, or the tag. I added the tag check because, in valid HTML, the title block must appear within the head block - so, with this check we will never parse the entire file in any case (unless there is no head block, of course).

The following should be able to accomplish this task:

string title = "";
try {
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest);
    HttpWebResponse response = (request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse);

    using (Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream()) {
        // compiled regex to check for  block
        Regex titleCheck = new Regex(@"", RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        int bytesToRead = 8092;
        byte[] buffer = new byte[bytesToRead];
        string contents = "";
        int length = 0;
        while ((length = stream.Read(buffer, 0, bytesToRead)) > 0) {
            // convert the byte-array to a string and add it to the rest of the
            // contents that have been downloaded so far
            contents += Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer, 0, length);

            Match m = titleCheck.Match(contents);
            if (m.Success) {
                // we found a  match =]
                title = m.Groups[1].Value.ToString();
                break;
            } else if (contents.Contains("")) {
                // reached end of head-block; no title found =[
                break;
            }
        }
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    Console.WriteLine(e);
}

UPDATE: Updated the original source-example to use a compiled Regex and a using statement for the Stream for better efficiency and maintainability.