Download a JSON String in C#

Question

I'm trying to download a JSON string in my Windows Store App which should look like this:

{
 "status": "okay",
 "result": {"id":"1",
            "type":"monument",
            "description":"The Spire",
            "latitude":"53.34978",
            "longitude":"-6.260316",
            "private": "{\"tag\":\"david\"}"}
}

but I'm getting what looks like info about the server. The output I'm getting is as follows:

Response: StatusCode: 200, ReasonPhrase: 'OK', Version: 1.1, Content: System.Net.Http.StreamContent, Headers:
{
  MS-Author-Via: DAV
  Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 15:13:53 GMT
  Server: Apache/2.2.22
  Server: (Unix)
  Server: DAV/2
  Server: PHP/5.3.15
  Server: with
  Server: Suhosin-Patch
  Server: mod_ssl/2.2.22
  Server: OpenSSL/0.9.8r
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.15
  Content-Length: 159
  Content-Type: text/json
}

I've been looking around and see that WebClient was used before Windows 8, and is now replaced with HttpClient. So instead of using DownloadString(), I've been using Content.ReadAsString(). Here's the bit of code I have so far:

public async Task<string> GetjsonStream()
{
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    string url = "http://(urlHere)";
    HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync(url);
    Debug.WriteLine("Response: " + response);
    return await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
}

Anyone know where I'm going wrong? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You are outputting the server response. The server response contains a StreamContent (see documentation here) but this StreamContent doesn't define a ToString, so the class name is output instead of the content.

ReadAsStringAsync (documentation here) is the right method to get the content sent back by the server. You should print out the return value of this call instead:

public async Task<string> GetjsonStream()
{
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    string url = "http://(urlHere)";
    HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync(url);
    string content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
    Debug.WriteLine("Content: " + content);
    return content;
}