Question

Im trying to create a web service which gets to a URL e.g. www.domain.co.uk/prices.csv and then reads the csv file. Is this possible and how? Ideally without downloading the csv file?

Answer 1

You could use:

public string GetCSV(string url)
{
    HttpWebRequest req = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)req.GetResponse();

    StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(resp.GetResponseStream());
    string results = sr.ReadToEnd();
    sr.Close();

    return results;
} 

And then to split it:

public static void SplitCSV()
{
    List<string> splitted = new List<string>();
    string fileList = getCSV("http://www.google.com");
    string[] tempStr;

    tempStr = fileList.Split(',');

    foreach (string item in tempStr)
    {
        if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(item))
        {
            splitted.Add(item);
        }
    }
}

Though there are plenty of CSV parsers out there and i would advise against rolling your own. FileHelpers is a good one.