Question

I recently was using HttpWebResponse to return xml data from a HttpWebRequest, and I noticed that the stream returned a null terminated string to me.

I assume its because the underlying library has to be compatible with C++, but I wasn’t able to find a resource to provide further illumination.

Mostly I’m wondering if there is an easy way to disable this behavior so I don’t have to sanitize strings I’m passing into my xml reader.

---

Edit here is a sample of the relevant code:

httpResponse.GetResponseStream().Read(serverBuffer, 0, BUFFER_SIZE);
output = processResponse(System.Text.UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetString(serverBuffer))

where processResponse looks like:

 processResponse(string xmlResponse)
 {
     var Parser = new XmlDocument();
     xmlResponse = xmlResponse.Replace('\0',' '); //fix for httpwebrequest null terminating strings
     Parser.LoadXml(xmlResponse);

Answer 1

Could it be that you are setting a size (wrong size) to the buffer you are loading?

You can use a StreamReader to avoid the temp buffer if you don’t need it.

using(var stream = new StreamReader(httpResponse.GetResponseStream()))
{
  string output = stream.ReadToEnd();
//...
}