HTTP over C# sockets

Question

I am trying to send HTTP request and recieve responce from the server over C# sockets, and i'm new with this language.

I've wrote following code (IP resolved correctly):

IPEndPoint RHost = new IPEndPoint(IP, Port);
Socket socket = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
socket.Connect(RHost);

String HTTPRequestHeaders_String = "GET ?q=fdgdfg HTTP/1.0
Host: google.com
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.205 Safari/534.16
Referer: http://google.com/";

MessageBox.Show(HTTPRequestHeaders_String, "Request");

byte[] HTTPRequestHeaders = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(HTTPRequestHeaders_String);
socket.Send(HTTPRequestHeaders, SocketFlags.None);

String Response = "";
byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) socket.ReceiveBufferSize];

int bytes;
do
{
    // On this lane program stops to react
    bytes = socket.Receive(buffer);
    // This line cannot be reached, tested with breakpoint
    Response += Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer, 0, bytes);
}
while (bytes >= 0);

MessageBox.Show(Response, "Response");

What am i doing wrong? I need just to load full HTML of page, or at least few characters from response (i cant do even this).

I need to create HTTP requst headers as a string, is it possible in these classes? — Andrew Dryga, Oct 17 '11 at 20:11
Why do you need to create the HTTP request headers manually? — Adam Robinson, Oct 17 '11 at 20:19
check this, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6208015/using-httprequest-to-get-pictures-from-given-url and you can use httprequest async its more good. — Mustafa Ekici, Oct 17 '11 at 21:38
@AdamRobinson Well, im trying to write simple server stress toold (like LOIC). This is my task for exam work in University. Socket's in this context is better and i need ability to write HTTP request to make better interface. — Andrew Dryga, Oct 17 '11 at 21:40
In your send "HTTPRequestHeaders_String" , missing 2 empty lines at the end : see https://gist.github.com/chouteau/c0a074f413d0800e818f7e357604d473 — mchouteau, Aug 06 '20 at 08:30

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 17 '11 at 20:11

7

I would suggest looking into the protocol itself if you want to do this raw, http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.0/spec.html#Request

And try sending the CRLF to terminate the request ;)

answered Oct 17 '11 at 20:11

Sabre

2,350
2
18
25

Wow, i was like 5 hours on this problem and forgot to terminate request, thanks a lot! :) – Andrew Dryga Oct 17 '11 at 20:21
Now, your problem is solved, you have learned how create a Http header from scratch, It is time to switch to higher level of abstraction. As previously mentioned, use `HttpWebRequest` or `WebClient` – L.B Oct 17 '11 at 20:29

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 28 '13 at 15:04

1

I found the Mentalis Proxy to be extremely helpful in understanding the Http Request/Response cycle at a socket level: http://www.mentalis.org/soft/projects/proxy/

answered Feb 28 '13 at 15:04

arachnode.net

791
5
12

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 17 '11 at 20:21

var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
Stream responseStream = webClient.OpenRead("http://www.google.com");
if (responseStream != null)
{
   var responseReader = new StreamReader(responseStream);
   string response = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
   MessageBox.Show(response);
}

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 17 '11 at 20:18

There is the TcpClient class which on one hand allows you to have a full control over the request (you create request body as string) and on the other hand is much simpler to use than a low-level socket.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.tcpclient.aspx

HTTP over C# sockets

4 Answers4

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