Reading "chunked" response with HttpWebResponse

Haven't tried it this with a "chunked" response but would something like this work?

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
Byte[] buf = new byte[8192];
Stream resStream = response.GetResponseStream();
string tmpString = null;
int count = 0;
do
{
     count = resStream.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length);
     if(count != 0)
     {
          tmpString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buf, 0, count);
          sb.Append(tmpString);
     }
}while (count > 0);

I am working on a similar problem. The .net HttpWebRequest and HttpWebRequest handle cookies and redirects automatically but they do not handle chunked content on the response body automatically.

This is perhaps because chunked content may contain more than simple data (i.e.: chunk names, trailing headers).

Simply reading the stream and ignoring the EOF exception will not work as the stream contains more than the desired content. The stream will contain chunks and each chunk begins by declaring its size. If the stream is simply read from beginning to end the final data will contain the chunk meta-data (and in case where it is gziped content it will fail the CRC check when decompressing).

To solve the problem it is necessary to manually parse the stream, removing the chunk size from each chunk (as well as the CR LF delimitors), detecting the final chunk and keeping only the chunk data. There likely is a library out there somewhere that does this, I have not found it yet.

Usefull resources :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2616#section-3.6.1