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asp.nethttpweb-applications

Returning plain text or other arbitary file in ASP.net

If I were to respond to an http request with a plain text in PHP, I would do something like:

<?php 
    header('Content-Type: text/plain');
    echo "This is plain text";
?>

How would I do the equivalent in ASP.NET?

Solution

  • If you only want to return plain text like that I would use an ashx file (Generic Handler in VS). Then just add the text you want to return in the ProcessRequest method.

    public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
        context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
        context.Response.Write("This is plain text");
    }

    This removes the added overhead of a normal aspx page.