Question

I’m interested in pulling a file from online a .txt file.

The txt file stores:

filename
md5 hash
filename
md5 hash

I am interested in getting the data from online then comparing the data to local files.

        byte[] buffer = new byte[512];
        WebRequest test = WebRequest.Create("http://www.domain.com/file.txt");
        Stream something = test.GetRequestStream();
        something.Read(buffer,0,20);

I don’t quite understand streams and how to go about reading just one line from the file. I do not want to download the file first then retrieve the data. I’m interested in just pulling it from online. How different are “streams” vs normal IO, with StreamWriter and StreamReader?

EDIT–

       WebRequest myWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.domain.com/file.txt");

       WebResponse myReponse = myWebRequest.GetResponse();

       Stream recStream = myReponse.GetResponseStream();

       StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(recStream);

       txt_status.Text = reader.ReadLine();

Answer 1

GetRequestStream provides a stream for writing to. If you want the returned data to walk through make use of GetResponseStream

...

Stream ReceiveStream = myWebResponse.GetResponseStream();

    Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");

        // Pipe the stream to a higher level stream reader with the required encoding format. 
     StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader( ReceiveStream, encode );
     Console.WriteLine("\nResponse stream received");
     Char[] read = new Char[256];

        // Read 256 charcters at a time.    
     int count = readStream.Read( read, 0, 256 );
        Console.WriteLine("HTML...\r\n");

    while (count > 0) 
    {
            // Dump the 256 characters on a string and display the string onto the console.
        String str = new String(read, 0, count);
        Console.Write(str);
        count = readStream.Read(read, 0, 256);
    }

...