Question

I’m trying to write a bit of code to login to a website. But it’s not working. Please can you give me some advice. This is my a bit of code:

static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        CookieContainer container = new CookieContainer();
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://pagehype.com/login.php");
        request.Method = "POST";
        request.Timeout = 10000;
        request.ReadWriteTimeout = 30000;
        request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) (Prevx 3.0.5)";
        request.CookieContainer = container;

        ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
        string postData = "username=user&password=password&processlogin=1&return=";
        byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData);

        request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        request.ContentLength = data.Length;
        Stream newStream = request.GetRequestStream();
        newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
        newStream.Close();

        HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
        string htmldoc = reader.ReadToEnd();
        response.Close();

        Console.Write(htmldoc);
    }

Many thanks,

Answer 1

PHP logins use PHPSESSID cookie. You’ll need to capture this and pass it back in the CookieContainer. This is how the server will recognise you as an authenticated user.

The cookie is set in the Set-Cookie header in the initial response. You’ll need to parse it to recreate the cookie in your container (don’t forget the path (and domain?)

var setCookie = response.GetResponseHeader("Set-Cookie");
response.Close();

container = new CookieContainer();
foreach (var cookie in setCookie.Split(','))
{
    var split = cookie.Split(';');
    string name = split[0].Split('=')[0];
    string value = split[0].Split('=')[1];
    var c = new Cookie(name, value);

    if (cookie.Contains(" Domain="))
        c.Domain = split.Where(x => x.StartsWith(" Domain")).First().Split('=')[1];
    else
    {
        c.Domain = ".pagehype.com";
    }

    if (cookie.Contains(" Path="))
        c.Path = split.Where(x => x.StartsWith(" Path")).First().Split('=')[1];

    container.Add(c);
}

Then add this container to your request.