Downloading a webpage in C# example
- by Chris
I am trying to understand some example code on this web page: (http://www.csharp-station.com/HowTo/HttpWebFetch.aspx) that downloads a file from the internet.
The piece of code quoted below goes through a loop getting chunks of data and saving them to a string until all the data has been downloaded. As I understand it, "count" contains the size of the downloaded chunk and the loop runs until count is 0 (an empty chunk of data is downloaded).
My question is, isn't it possible that count could be 0 without the file being completely downloaded? Say if the network connection is interrupted, the stream may not have any data to read on a pass of the loop and count should be 0, ending the download prematurely. Or does ResStream.Read stop the program until it gets data? Is this the correct way to save a stream?
int count = 0;
do
{
// fill the buffer with data
count = resStream.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length);
// make sure we read some data
if (count != 0)
{
// translate from bytes to ASCII text
tempString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buf, 0, count);
// continue building the string
sb.Append(tempString);
}
}
while (count 0); // any more data to read?
