How do I download a webpage into a stream in .NET

Question

I know this should be a basic question but I am hitting a brick wall. I am looking to go to a URL/URI download the resulting string as if I had opened a file and then get it out into a String variable.

I have been stuffing about with IO.Stream and Net.httpxxx but haven't managed to get the elements to line up in the right way.

I get "the given path's format is not supported" from opening the page in the standard stream, because it's not in the local file system ... that bit i understand, the bit I don't get is ... how do I achieve the equivelent of:

Public Function GetWebPageAsString(pURL As String) As String
        Dim lStream As IO.StreamReader = New System.IO.StreamReader(pURL)
        Return lStream.ReadToEnd

End Function

Answer 1

The short answer, in C#, looks like

using(System.Net.WebClient client = new System.Net.WebClient())
{
  string html = client.DownloadString("http://www.google.com");
}

Answer 2

WebClient.OpenRead() might be what you're looking for.

Sample from the MSDN page linked above:

 Dim uriString as String
 uriString = "http://www.google.com"

 Dim myWebClient As New WebClient()

 Console.WriteLine("Accessing {0} ...", uriString)

 Dim myStream As Stream = myWebClient.OpenRead(uriString)

 Console.WriteLine(ControlChars.Cr + "Displaying Data :" + ControlChars.Cr)
 Dim sr As New StreamReader(myStream)
 Console.WriteLine(sr.ReadToEnd())

 myStream.Close()