'System.Net.WebException' when accessing WebClient. Works fine on browser

Question

I want to go to download a string from a website, I made this php file to show an example.

(This won't work around my whole website)

The link http://swageh.co/information.php won't be downloaded using a webClient from any PC.

I prefer using a webClient. No matter what I try, it won't downloadString. It works fine on a browser.

It returns an error 500 An unhandled exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll

Additional information: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. is the error

It's not uncommon for sites to inspect your session and headers before returning a file to download, perhaps try it out using a tool like postman that will allow you to tinker with the headers easily. — Sam
– Sam, Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 15:41
Please specify the error message returned with the error 500 (if any) — Zeeno
– Zeeno, Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 16:31
@deztructicus An unhandled exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll Additional information: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. — XxMulti GamerxX
– XxMulti GamerxX, Commented Jul 19, 2018 at 23:09

Thymine · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-20 15:26:34Z

1

Did you change something on the server-side?
All of the following options are working just fine for me as of right now (all return just "false" with StatusCode of 200):

 var client = new WebClient();
 var stringResult = client.DownloadString("http://swageh.co/information.php");

Also HttpWebRequest:

 HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://swageh.co/information.php");
 request.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();

Newer HttpClient:

var client = new HttpClient();

var req = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, "http://swageh.co/information.php");

var res = client.SendAsync(req);

var stringResult = res.Result.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;

answered Jul 20, 2018 at 15:26

Thymine

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2 Comments

user5292841 Over a year ago

yes there is no 301 redirect now when you open the link in Chrome.

XxMulti GamerxX Over a year ago

worked like a charm, still don't know why it suddenly stopped returning 301 because I didn't change any code.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-20 14:48:18Z

it's because your website is responding with 301 Moved Permanently see Get where a 301 URl redirects to This shows how to automatically follow the redirect: Using WebClient in C# is there a way to get the URL of a site after being redirected? look at Christophe Debove's answer rather than the accepted answer.

Interestingly this doesn't work - tried making headers the same as Chrome as below, perhaps use Telerik Fiddler to see what is happening.

var strUrl = "http://theurl_inhere";
            var headers = new WebHeaderCollection();
            headers.Add("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.9");
            headers.Add("Cache-Control", "no-cache");
            headers.Add("Pragma", "no-cache");
            headers.Add("Upgrade-Insecure-Requests", "1");

            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(strUrl);
            request.Method = "GET";
            request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip | DecompressionMethods.Deflate;
            request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml; q = 0.9,image / webp,image / apng,*/*;q=0.8";
            request.Headers.Add( headers );
            request.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
            request.KeepAlive = true;
            request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.99 Safari/537.36";

            HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
            Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();

            var strLastRedirect = response.ResponseUri.ToString();

            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);
            string strResponse = reader.ReadToEnd();

            response.Close();

Didn't work for me, sadly. But I did get the error code.An unhandled exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll Additional information: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send. Returned the exact error code as the regular webClient.

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