Question

I am integrating with a REST service and so far so good.
Hit a little bit of a hurdle.
I am hitting the service via a HttpWebRequest.
I am receiving responses successfully, but in running the HttpWebResponse GetResponseStream through a StreamReader, i am getting back an

<int xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">427</int>.

A little stuck on how to convert this back to a c# int.

Any advice?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You may take a look at the int.Parse and int.TryParse methods in conjunction with a XDocument which you could use to load the response XML into:

var request = WebRequest.Create(...);
...
using (var response = request.GetResponse())
using (var stream = response.GetStream())
{
    var doc = XDocument.Load(stream);
    if (int.TryParse(doc.Root.Value, out value))
    {

        // the parsing was successful => you could do something with
        // the integer value you have just read from the body of the response
        // assuming the server returned the XML you have shown in your question,
        // value should equal 427 here.
    }
}

or even easier, the Load method of XDocument understands HTTP, so you could even do this:

var doc = XDocument.Load("http://foo/bar");
if (int.TryParse(doc.Root.Value, out value))
{
    // the parsing was successful => you could do something with
    // the integer value you have just read from the body of the response
    // assuming the server returned the XML you have shown in your question,
    // value should equal 427 here.
}

this way you don’t even need to use any HTTP requests/responses. Everything will be handled for you by the BCL which is kinda great.