Storing the contents of a web page into a string and comparing it to another string

Question

I'm trying to get the contents of a hosted .txt file on a website and compare it to a string or "key". Both strings read as the same however when compared against each other in an if statement to see if they match, they apparently do not.

For example, the contents of http://1.2.3.4/test.txt is 'hello'

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


namespace TestProgram
{
    public class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string key = "hello";
            WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://1.2.3.4/test.txt");
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
            Stream data = response.GetResponseStream();
            string html = String.Empty;
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(data))
            {
                html = sr.ReadToEnd();
            }
            if (html == key)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("True");
                Console.ReadKey();
            }          
        }
    }  
}

I've tried html.Equals(key) and that doesn't work either. I've used WebClient as well and get the same result.

use the debugger to see what's in the string and what's not – Daniel A. White Feb 21 '21 at 17:14 — Daniel A. White, Feb 21 '21 at 17:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '21 at 17:48

1

It would be better if you bring your txt file as an example, I suppose there is some character escapes in the file, such as \n (new line) so you should trim, or replace this new line character from your response text first, before you check the equality:

Trim:

html.Trim()

Replace:

html.Replace(System.Environment.NewLine, string.Empty);

also, see this question

answered Feb 21 '21 at 17:48

godot

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All I did was echo "hello" into a new file so it was as raw as possible – Ryvik Feb 21 '21 at 18:03
have you tried trim or replace? – godot Feb 21 '21 at 18:04
1

Looks like trim did the trick. Very odd but thank you – Ryvik Feb 21 '21 at 18:18

Storing the contents of a web page into a string and comparing it to another string

1 Answers1