What difference is there between WebClient and HTTPWebRequest classes in NET

Question

What difference is there between the WebClient and the HttpWebRequest classes in  NET  They both do very similar things  In fact  why weren t they merged into one class  too many methods variables etc may be one reason but there are other classes in  NET which breaks that rule    Thanks

User · Answer

Also WebClient doesn t have timeout property  And that s the problem  because dafault value is 100 seconds and that s too much to indicate if there s no Internet connection   Workaround for that problem is here https   stackoverflow com a 3052637 1303422

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WebClient is a higher-level abstraction built on top of HttpWebRequest to simplify the most common tasks  For instance  if you want to get the content out of an HttpWebResponse  you have to read from the response stream   var http    HttpWebRequest WebRequest Create  http   example com    var response   http GetResponse     var stream   response GetResponseStream    var sr   new StreamReader stream   var content   sr ReadToEnd      With WebClient  you just do DownloadString   var client   new WebClient    var content   client DownloadString  http   example com      Note  I left out the using statements from both examples for brevity  You should definitely take care to dispose your web request objects properly   In general  WebClient is good for quick and dirty simple requests and HttpWebRequest is good for when you need more control over the entire request

User · Answer

I know its too longtime to reply but just as an information purpose for future readers   WebRequest  System Object     System MarshalByRefObject         System Net WebRequest   The WebRequest is an abstract base class  So you actually don t use it directly  You use it through it derived classes - HttpWebRequest and FileWebRequest    You use Create method of WebRequest to create an instance of WebRequest  GetResponseStream returns data stream    There are also FileWebRequest and FtpWebRequest classes that inherit from WebRequest  Normally  you would use WebRequest to  well  make a request and convert the return to either HttpWebRequest  FileWebRequest or FtpWebRequest  depend on your request  Below is an example   Example   var  request    HttpWebRequest WebRequest Create  http   stackverflow com    var  response    HttpWebResponse  request GetResponse      WebClient  System Object         System MarshalByRefObject             System ComponentModel Component                 System Net WebClient   WebClient provides common operations to sending and receiving data from a resource identified by a URI  Simply  it   s a higher-level abstraction of HttpWebRequest  This    common operations    is what differentiate WebClient from HttpWebRequest  as also shown in the sample below   Example   var  client   new WebClient    var  stackContent    client DownloadString  http   stackverflow com      There are also DownloadData and DownloadFile operations under WebClient instance  These common operations also simplify code of what we would normally do with HttpWebRequest  Using HttpWebRequest  we have to get the response of our request  instantiate StreamReader to read the response and finally  convert the result to whatever type we expect  With WebClient  we just simply call DownloadData  DownloadFile or DownloadString   However  keep in mind that WebClient DownloadString doesn   t consider the encoding of the resource you requesting  So  you would probably end up receiving weird characters if you don   t specify and encoding   NOTE  Basically  WebClient takes few lines of code as compared to Webrequest

[c#] What difference is there between WebClient and HTTPWebRequest classes in .NET?

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