Automatic Cookie Handling C#/.NET HttpWebRequest+HttpWebResponse

Question

Is there any way to automatically handle cookies in .NET with the HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse objects? I'm preferably looking for an equivalent to LWP::UserAgent and its behaviour (perl), only in a .NET environment.

Any suggestions or advise?

Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for is the CookieContainer class. If I understand what you're trying to do correctly, you have separate objects for request & response, and you want to transfer the response cookie collection into the next request cookie collection automatically. Try using this code:

CookieContainer cookieJar = new CookieContainer();
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("http://www.google.com");
request.CookieContainer = cookieJar;

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
int cookieCount = cookieJar.Count;

Once you create a cookieJar and set it to the request's CookieContainer, it will store any cookies that come from the response, so in the example above, the cookie jar's count will be 1 once it visits Google.com. The cookie container properties of the request & response above will store a pointer to the cookieJar, so the cookies are automatically handled and shared between the objects.

Answer 2

I am running into another cookie issue in a scraping scenario. Int the page, cookie gets created using a series of Javacript If Else statements. Does the above example work in this case? Or do I have to parse the javascript using regex and find the the name, value pair etc of cookies and create a cookie collection myself? Thank you