Weird behaviour of HttpWebRequest while using WebProxy
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13-10-2019 - |
Question
I have an HttpWebRequest with a StreamReader that works very fine without using a WebProxy. When I use WebProxy, the StreamReader reads strange character instead of the actual html. Here is the code.
HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://URL");
req.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.224 Safari/534.10";
req.Accept = "application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5";
req.Headers.Add("Accept-Charset", "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3");
req.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip,deflate,sdch");
req.Headers.Add("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.8");
req.Method = "GET";
req.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
WebProxy proxy = new WebProxy("proxyIP:proxyPort");
proxy.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("proxyUser", "proxyPass");
req.Proxy = this.proxy;
HttpWebResponse res = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream());
string html = reader.ReadToEnd();
Without using the WebProxy
, the variable html
holds the expected html string from the URL. But with a WebProxy
, html
holds a value like that:
"�\b\0\0\0\0\0\0��]r����s�Y����\0\tP\"]ki���ػ��-��X�\0\f���/�!�HU���>Cr���P$%�nR�� z�g��3�t�~q3�ٵȋ(M���14&?\r�d:�ex�j��p������.��Y��o�|��ӎu�OO.�����\v]?}�~������E:�b��Lן�Ԙ6+�l���岳�Y��y'ͧ��~#5ϩ�it�2��5��%�p��E�L����t&x0:-�2��i�C���$M��_6��zU�t.J�>C-��GY��k�O�R$�P�T��8+�*]HY\"���$
Ō�-�r�ʙ
�H3\f8Jd���Q(:�G�E���r���Rܔ�ڨ�����W�<]$����i>8\b�p� �\= 4\f�> �&��$��\v��C��C�vC��x�p�|\"b9�ʤ�\r%i��w@��\t�r�M�� �����!�G�jP�8.D�k�Xʹt�J��/\v!�r��y\f7<����\",\a�/IK���ۚ�r�����ҿ5�;���}h��+Q��IO]�8��c����n�AGڟu2>�
Solution
Since you are passing
req.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip,deflate,sdch");
I would say your proxy compress the stream before sending it back to you.
Inspect the headers of the Response to check the encoding.
OTHER TIPS
Just use Gzip to decompress it.