Question

I’m creating a program where I need to search an FTP server and download all files which match a given regex. How do I do this? I can connect to the FTP server, but how do I scan all files in the given path for files matching the regex?

I also need to do the same for HTTP servers which I think will be fundamentally more difficult, but I’ll stick to doing the FTP server for now.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use this to get a list

public string[] GetFileList()
    {
        string[] downloadFiles;
        StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
        FtpWebRequest reqFTP;
        try
        {
            reqFTP = (FtpWebRequest)FtpWebRequest.Create(new Uri("ftp://" + ftpServerIP + "/"));
            reqFTP.UseBinary = true;
            reqFTP.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(ftpUserID, ftpPassword);
            reqFTP.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.ListDirectory;
            WebResponse response = reqFTP.GetResponse();
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());

            string line = reader.ReadLine();
            while (line != null)
            {
                result.Append(line);
                result.Append("\n");
                line = reader.ReadLine();
            }
            // to remove the trailing '\n'
            result.Remove(result.ToString().LastIndexOf('\n'), 1);
            reader.Close();
            response.Close();
            return result.ToString().Split('\n');
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
            downloadFiles = null;
            return downloadFiles;
        }
    }

and then maipulate GetFileList Array using regex as per your need