webclient headers class

Question

I am using the WebClient class with cookies as mentioned here: Using CookieContainer with WebClient class

What steps are required to add a custom user agent to every request made by this WebClient?

I tried to put the

Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "...")

line into

protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest

but that did not work: "This header must be modified using the appropriate property".

were you aware that WebClient is part of .NET and not part of C#? — John Saunders, Jun 30 '10 at 23:49

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 30 '10 at 23:56

from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webclient.aspx ,

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

    public class Test
    {
        public static void Main (string[] args)
        {
            if (args == null || args.Length == 0)
            {
                throw new ApplicationException ("Specify the URI of the resource to retrieve.");
            }
            WebClient client = new WebClient ();

            // Add a user agent header in case the 
            // requested URI contains a query.

            client.Headers.Add ("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");

            Stream data = client.OpenRead (args[0]);
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (data);
            string s = reader.ReadToEnd ();
            Console.WriteLine (s);
            data.Close ();
            reader.Close ();
        }
    }

Did you know your code was unformatted? Next time, please select it in the editor and press Control-K. — John Saunders, Jun 30 '10 at 23:57
old answer but it just solved my problem in a heartbeat so it deserved an upvote. — nycdan, Apr 09 '11 at 00:18

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '11 at 19:56

Kinda late answer but here it goes; I had the same problem as you and solved it by adding a line to the example you linked:

public class CookieAwareWebClient : WebClient
{
    private CookieContainer m_container = new CookieContainer();

    protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri address)
    {
        WebRequest request = base.GetWebRequest(address);
        if (request is HttpWebRequest)
        {
            (request as HttpWebRequest).UserAgent       = "CUSTOM USERAGENT HERE";
            (request as HttpWebRequest).CookieContainer = m_container;
        }
        return request;
    }
}

webclient headers class

2 Answers2