Question

I’m trying to understand the MSDN documentation for FtpWebRequest and more specificaly, how to upload using FTP and C#

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

namespace Examples.System.Net
{
    public class WebRequestGetExample
    {
        public static void Main ()
        {
            // Get the object used to communicate with the server.
            FtpWebRequest request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("ftp://www.contoso.com/test.htm");
            request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;

            // This example assumes the FTP site uses anonymous logon.
            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential ("anonymous","[e-mail]");

            // Copy the contents of the file to the request stream.
            StreamReader sourceStream = new StreamReader("testfile.txt");
            byte [] fileContents = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sourceStream.ReadToEnd());
            sourceStream.Close();
            request.ContentLength = fileContents.Length;

            Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();
            requestStream.Write(fileContents, 0, fileContents.Length);
            requestStream.Close();

            FtpWebResponse response = (FtpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

            Console.WriteLine("Upload File Complete, status {0}", response.StatusDescription);

            response.Close();
            }
        }
    }
}

In the code above they reference 2 file types. Am I right in assuming that testfile.txt is the ‘source’ file (on the local computer) and test.htm is what testfile.txt will be renamed too?

Answer 1

Yes – you’re uploading to test.htm, loading the data from testfile.txt. You can tell that because test.htm is part of the URL (so is remote) whereas testfile.txt is loaded by just creating a StreamReader over a file.

(It’s worth noting that this code is pretty bad in various ways, by the way – particularly around resource disposal. Don’t treat it as embodying best practices…)