SimplyGold

Yesterday was hellishly long, leading to a drought in creative thought, which means that now it's time for a mini how-to on .NET programming.

using System.Net;

.NET makes it ridiculously easy to grab content from web pages. We're specifically interested in two classes in the System.Net namespace --- HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse (their respective parents, WebRequest and WebResponse can also be used).

I created a tiny little console application that takes a url and outputs the web page's content to the specified file on the hard drive.

Code's below the fold; it's pretty self-explanatory, so I'll leave you to it.

using System;    // For Console
using System.IO;   // For Path, StreamReader, StreamWriter
using System.Net;   // For HttpWebRequest, HttpWebResponse

namespace ScreenGrabber
{
 public class Program
 {
  public static void Main(string[] args)
  {
   try
   {
    if (args.Length != 2)
    {
     throw new ArgumentException("Usage: screengrabber [url] [filepath]");
    }

    string url = args[0];

    string path = Path.GetFullPath(args[1]);

    string contents = string.Empty;

    if (File.Exists(path))
    {
     Console.WriteLine(" -> Deleting file...");

     File.Delete(path);
    }

    Console.WriteLine(" -> Fetching web page...");

    HttpWebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;

    using (HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
    {
     Console.WriteLine(" -> Status Code: " + response.StatusCode);

     if (response.StatusCode != System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK)
     {
      throw new ArgumentException("Url returned a bad status code: " + 
       response.StatusCode.ToString());
     }

     using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
     {
      contents = reader.ReadToEnd();
     }
    }

    contents = contents.Trim();

    if (contents.Length < 1)
    {
     throw new Exception("The web page has no content!");
    }

    Console.WriteLine(" -> Writing file...");

    using (StreamWriter writer = File.CreateText(path))
    {
     writer.Write(contents);
    }

    Console.WriteLine(" -> All done!");
   }

   catch (Exception ex)
   {
    Console.WriteLine("Whoops! Something went wrong.");

    Console.WriteLine("Message: " + ex.Message);

    Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + "Press enter to exit.");

    Console.ReadLine();
   }
  }
 }
}