CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#c#-4.0
Sam Cromer
Sam Cromer

Reputation: 707

cURL call in C#

I need to perform a cURL request to grab a CSV file from the web. I've never used cURL before and so far the stuff I have seen via google doesn't seem to make sense:

the cURL call needs to look like this:

curl --user username:password http://somewebsite.com/events.csv

the code I am trying to use ( i use this to grab basic auth XML files)

string URL = "http://somewebsite.com/events.csv";
string Username = "username";
string Password = "password";
WebClient req = new WebClient();

CredentialCache myCache = new CredentialCache();
myCache.Add(new Uri(URL), "Basic", new NetworkCredential(Username, Password));

req.Credentials = myCache;

string results = null;
results = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(req.DownloadData(URL));

This just gives me back the html for a login screen so the authentication is not happening.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3281

Answers (2)

Sam Cromer
Sam Cromer

Reputation: 707

I found the issue. Apparently the request fails when you pass an @ sign ( like in the email username ) in the username field so it must be Converted to a base 64 string. Here is the code just in case someone else runs into this:

    string url = "https://website.com/events.csv"; 
    WebRequest myReq = WebRequest.Create(url);      
    string username = "username";
    string password = "password";
    string usernamePassword = username + ":" + password;
    CredentialCache mycache = new CredentialCache();
    mycache.Add(new Uri(url), "Basic", new NetworkCredential(username, password));
    myReq.Credentials = mycache;
    myReq.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(new ASCIIEncoding().GetBytes(usernamePassword)));

    WebResponse wr = myReq.GetResponse();
    Stream receiveStream = wr.GetResponseStream();
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(receiveStream, Encoding.UTF8);
    string content = reader.ReadToEnd();
    Console.WriteLine(content);
    Console.ReadLine();

Upvotes: 4

mkocubinski
mkocubinski

Reputation: 455

Looks like you're trying to use the BasicAuth protocol to login to a site? If you're getting an HTML page back with a login screen, the site is not using BasicAuth. BasicAuth is those old-style URLs you rarely see like:

username:password@http://somewebsite.com/events.csv

With BasicAuth, your browser handles the authentication with a little popup window.

To access this site with curl, you'll need to go through accessing the login page, filling out the form, submitting, or validating with a cookie, token, or some other method.

Upvotes: 1

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