HttpWebRequest: how to identify as a browser?

Question

The question is how to construct HttpWebRequest so queried server will think it comes from a browser?

Answer 1

You could set the User-Agent HTTP request header.

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com");
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2";

or if you work with a WebClient:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    client.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2";
    ...
}