WebClient can't download string

Question

Why does this not works -

"The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly"

    static void Main()
    {
        using (var client = new WebClient())
        {
            try
            {
                Console.WriteLine(client.DownloadString("http://oz.by/books/more10176026.html"));
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {

                throw;
            }
        }
    }

Usual GET requests are OK. check it here

Can you use a web debugger like Fiddler and check what's going on with the request? That would probably give a hint. — Pierre-Luc Pineault
– Pierre-Luc Pineault, Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 18:50

vcsjones · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-23 18:53:44Z

3

The server seems to choke because there is no User Agent header. This fixes it:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    try
    {
        //Add your user agent of choice. This is mine, just as an example.
        client.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.73.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.1 Safari/537.73.11");
        Console.WriteLine(client.DownloadString("http://oz.by/books/more10176026.html"));
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {

        throw;
    }
}

answered Dec 23, 2013 at 18:53

vcsjones

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1 Comment

user3092248 Over a year ago

yes, this works. I have followed msdn, and this was my mistake)) msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fhd1f0sw(v=vs.110).aspx

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