Question

I have the following C# ASP.Net code for processing PayPal IPN after purchase. I have set the Encoding in PayPal settings to UTF8. When I send the request back to PayPal with ASCII encoding (all the UTF8 in the code replaced to ASCII) everything works. When I send the request with UTF8 encoding, I receive “The request was aborted: The request was canceled.” exception at streamOut.Close() on the last line. I’m using Godaddy Shared Hosting with IIS 7 and .Net 2 enabled. Any suggestions?

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        string strRequest = string.Empty;
        try
        {
            string strLive = "https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr";
            HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(strLive);
            req.KeepAlive = false;
            req.ReadWriteTimeout = 600000;
            req.Timeout = 600000;

            //Set values for the request back
            req.Method = "POST";
            req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
            byte[] param = Request.BinaryRead(HttpContext.Current.Request.ContentLength);
            strRequest = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(param);
            strRequest += "&cmd=_notify-validate";
            req.ContentLength = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount(strRequest);

            //Send the request to PayPal and get the response
            Stream RequestStream = req.GetRequestStream();
            StreamWriter streamOut = new StreamWriter(RequestStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
            RequestStream.ReadTimeout = 600000;
            RequestStream.WriteTimeout = 600000;
            streamOut.Write(strRequest);
            streamOut.Close(); // EXCEPTION: "The request was aborted: The request was canceled."

Answer 1

It turns out that you have to use Encoding.ASCII anyway, as the string is URL encoded.