Use HTTPWebRequest to get remote page's title

Question

I have a web service that acts as an interface between a farm of websites and some analytics software. Part of the analytics tracking requires harvesting the page title. Rather than passing it from the webpage to the web service, I would like to use HTTPWebRequest to call the page.

I have code that will get the entire page and parse out the html to grab the title tag but I don't want to have to download the entire page to just get information that's in the head.

I've started with

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("url");
request.Method = "HEAD";

Answer 1

Great idea, but a HEAD request only returns the document's HTTP headers. This does not include the title element, which is part of the HTTP message body.

Answer 2

So I would have to go with something like...

HttpWebRequest req   = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);
HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();
Stream st            = resp.GetResponseStream();
StreamReader sr      = new StreamReader(st);
string buffer        = sr.ReadToEnd();
int startPos, endPos;
startPos = buffer.IndexOf("<title>",
StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) + 7;
endPos = buffer.IndexOf("</title>",
StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);
string title = buffer.Substring(startPos, endPos - startPos);
Console.WriteLine("Response code from {0}: {1}", s,
        resp.StatusCode);
Console.WriteLine("Page title: {0}", title);
sr.Close();
st.Close();