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c#posthttpwebrequest

C# HttpWebRequest of type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" - how to send '&' character in content body?

I'm writing a small API-connected application in C#.

I connect to a API which has a method that takes a long string, the contents of a calendar(ics) file.

I'm doing it like this:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(URL);
request.Method = "POST";
request.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
request.CookieContainer = my_cookie_container;
request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

string iCalStr = GetCalendarAsString();

string strNew = "&uploadfile=true&file=" + iCalStr;

using (StreamWriter stOut = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream(), System.Text.Encoding.ASCII))
 {
     stOut.Write(strNew);
     stOut.Close();
 }

This seems to work great, until I add some specific HTML in my calendar.

If I have a '&nbsp' somewhere in my calendar (or similar) the server only gets all the data up to the '&'-point, so I'm assuming the '&' makes it look like anything after this point belongs to a new parameter?

How can I fix this?

Solution

  • Since your content-type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded you'll need to encode the POST body, especially if it contains characters like & which have special meaning in a form.

    Try passing your string through HttpUtility.UrlEncode before writing it to the request stream.

    Here are a couple links for reference.