HTTPWebResponse using application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Question

So I sent an HTTPWebRequest using application/x-www-form-urlencoded as my content type. I assume that this means the reponse will be returned in a similar type? (EDIT: Have now been told this isn't the case)

My question is this. How do I access the different key/value pairs returned in the response. My code so far looks like this. I can of course read the string but surely there is a better way to access the data other than ripping the string apart.

    HttpWebResponse response = SendPOSTRequest("https://site/page?Service=foo", content.ToString(), "", "", true);

    string responseCode = response.StatusCode.ToString();
    string responseStatusDescription = response.StatusDescription;

    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

    string result = sr.ReadToEnd();

I tried using XML/linq to read the elements into an XDocument but of course it is not being returned in XML form.

Assume I have 3 or 4 different pieces of information in there how could I read them out?

EDIT: I have just checked and the data is being returned as text/plain. How can this be processed easily?

EDIT: The response string once retrieved via a streamreader is:

VPSProtocol=2.23
Status=OK
StatusDetail=Server transaction registered successfully.
VPSTxId={FDC93F3D-FC64-400D-875F-0B7E855AD81F}
SecurityKey=*****
NextURL=https://foo.com/PaymentPage.asp?TransactionID={875F-0B7E855AD81F}

EDIT: It seems this piece of code gets me part way there. I am able to break the response up into a List and address it line by line. It still isnt a perfect solution though.

            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

            List<string> str = new List<string>;

            while (sr.Peek() >= 0)
            {
                str.Add(sr.ReadLine().ToString());
            }

Answer 1

This is a bit quick and dirty, but you could just parse it out to a Dictionary like this;

var parsed = result.Split(new string[] { "\r\n", "\n" }, StringSplitOptions.None)
    .Select(x =>
    { 
        int split = x.IndexOf('=');
        return new
        {
            Key = x.Substring(0, split),
            Value = x.Substring(split + 1, x.Length - (split + 1))
        };
    }).ToDictionary(k => k.Key, v => v.Value);

Not sure how robust this is, but it should be a good start.

Edit: Updated to handle '=' character in the value.

Answer 2

So my case was a bit specialised in that I always know what I am going to have to deal with if the response does not contain certain words such as INVALID or MALFORMED. A dirty fix for me to get the other data from the text/plain response was achieved like so:

string responseCode = response.StatusCode.ToString();

string responseStatusDescription = response.StatusDescription;

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

string result = sr.ReadToEnd();

string[] parsed = result.Split(new string[] { "\r\n", "\n" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

List<string> str = parsed.ToList();
Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();

foreach (string s in str)

{

string[] ss = s.Split('=');

    if (ss.Count() == 2)
    {
        dictionary.Add(ss[0], ss[1]);
    }
    else
    {
        string value = "";

        for (int i = 0; i < ss.Count(); i++)
        {
            switch (i)
            {
                case 0:
                {
                    break;
                }
                case 1:
                {
                    value += ss[i];
                    break;
                }
                default:
                {

                    value += "=" + ss[i];

                    break;
                }
            }
        }

    dictionary.Add(ss[0], value);
    }
}

The switch statement was introduced because in the event of having a url passed back with a series of querystrings it was important to reconstruct them. The code above works fine.