C# Send POST request and receive 303 statuscode

Question

I'm writing simple application which connects to webpage and receives specific data from document's body.

I'm sending HttpWebRequest in this way:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://webpage.com/page1.php");
request.Method = "POST";
string postData = "some_post_data";
byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postData);
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.Referer = "http://webpage.com/";
request.ContentLength = byteArray.Length;
request.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31";
request.Headers.Add("Cookie", string.Format("sess_id={0}", UserInfo.SessionId));
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Charset", "ISO-8859-2,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Language", "pl-PL,pl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4");
request.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip");
request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.GZip;

Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream();
dataStream.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
dataStream.Close(); // *** [1] ***

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse(); // *** [2] ***
dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();
response.Close();

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(dataStream);
string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();

Fine! The request is ok, there is nothing magic. The point is, after dataStream.Close(); (line [1]) I receive 303 status code, which means there will be redirect to another page. When I read response at point [2] I see new (redirected) page.

All I want is to read headers before redirect. Is it possible anyway?

Answer 1

Set the AllowAutoRedirect property of request to false prior to calling GetResponse.

request.AllowAutoRedirect = false;
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

More information.