Download/Stream file from URL - asp.net

2 years later, I used Dallas' answer, but I had to change the HttpWebRequest to FileWebRequest since I was linking to direct files. Not sure if this is the case everywhere, but I figured I'd add it. Also, I removed

var resp = Http.Current.Resonse

and just used Http.Current.Response in place wherever resp was referenced.

I do this quite a bit and thought I could add a simpler answer. I set it up as a simple class here, but I run this every evening to collect financial data on companies I'm following.

class WebPage
{
    public static string Get(string uri)
    {
        string results = "N/A";

        try
        {
            HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
            HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream());
            results = sr.ReadToEnd();
            sr.Close();
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            results = ex.Message;
        }
        return results;
    }
}

In this case I pass in a url and it returns the page as HTML. If you want to do something different with the stream instead you can easily change this.

You use it like this:

string page = WebPage.Get("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo");

Download url to bytes and convert bytes into stream:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    var content = client.DownloadData(url);
    using (var stream = new MemoryStream(content))
    {
        ...
    }
}   

You could use HttpWebRequest to get the file and stream it back to the client. This allows you to get the file with a url. An example of this that I found ( but can't remember where to give credit ) is

    //Create a stream for the file
    Stream stream = null;

    //This controls how many bytes to read at a time and send to the client
    int bytesToRead = 10000;

    // Buffer to read bytes in chunk size specified above
    byte[] buffer = new Byte[bytesToRead];

    // The number of bytes read
    try
    {
      //Create a WebRequest to get the file
      HttpWebRequest fileReq = (HttpWebRequest) HttpWebRequest.Create(url);

      //Create a response for this request
      HttpWebResponse fileResp = (HttpWebResponse) fileReq.GetResponse();

      if (fileReq.ContentLength > 0)
        fileResp.ContentLength = fileReq.ContentLength;

        //Get the Stream returned from the response
        stream = fileResp.GetResponseStream();

        // prepare the response to the client. resp is the client Response
        var resp = HttpContext.Current.Response;

        //Indicate the type of data being sent
        resp.ContentType = MediaTypeNames.Application.Octet;
    
        //Name the file 
        resp.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=\"" + fileName + "\"");
        resp.AddHeader("Content-Length", fileResp.ContentLength.ToString());
    
        int length;
        do
        {
            // Verify that the client is connected.
            if (resp.IsClientConnected)
            {
                // Read data into the buffer.
                length = stream.Read(buffer, 0, bytesToRead);

                // and write it out to the response's output stream
                resp.OutputStream.Write(buffer, 0, length);

                // Flush the data
                resp.Flush();

                //Clear the buffer
                buffer = new Byte[bytesToRead];
            }
            else
            {
                // cancel the download if client has disconnected
                length = -1;
            }
        } while (length > 0); //Repeat until no data is read
    }
    finally
    {
        if (stream != null)
        {
            //Close the input stream
            stream.Close();
        }
    }