Grabbing a remote web page in C#

Want to quickly grab a remote web page somewhere using C#? The code snippet below sends a get request to the URL you specify and returns a string containing the resulting page. If any error occurs it will return an empty string. You can of course change the catch block to throw any exceptions up to the calling code.


using System.Net;
using System.Text

private string GetWebPage(string url)
{
try
{
HttpWebRequest? webRequest =
(HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
webRequest.Timeout = 6000;
HttpWebResponse? webResponse =
(HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
Stream responseStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream();
string responseEncoding = webResponse.ContentEncoding.Trim();
if (responseEncoding.Length == 0)
responseEncoding="us-ascii";
StreamReader? responseReader = new StreamReader(responseStream,
System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(responseEncoding));
return(responseReader.ReadToEnd());
}
catch
{
return(string.Empty);
}
}