Question

I’m tryinig to load a file from a web server with a request URL that contains a parameter with cyrillic chars.
But I’m not getting this to work in c#, even if I URL-Encode the param.

When I open the page in IE with
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ
the server does not respond.

Using the URL-encoded version
http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=%d0%97%d0%94%d0%a0%d0%90%d0%92%d0%a1%d0%a2%d0%92%d0%a3%d0%99%d0%a2%d0%95
the server responds as expected.

Now my problem:
I want to download the MP3 from C# …

var url = string.Format("http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q={0}", 
          Server.UrlEncode("ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ"));
System.Net.WebClient client = new WebClient(); 
var res = client.DownloadData(url);

And this does NOT work with cyrillic chars. I always get a zero-byte answer, like the first, non-encoded request.
When I send “normal” chars, the code above works fine.

So … I’m doing something wrong.
Any hints? Tipps? Solutions?

Thanks
Michael

Answer 1

You have to set the user-agent for the WebClient – this works:

string url = "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=ru&q=ЗДРАВСТВУЙТЕ";
WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.Headers.Add("user-agent", 
                   "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");
var res = client.DownloadData(url);

From the msdn documentation:

A WebClient instance does not send
optional HTTP headers by default. If
your request requires an optional
header, you must add the header to the
Headers collection. For example, to
retain queries in the response, you
must add a user-agent header. Also,
servers may return 500 (Internal
Server Error) if the user agent header
is missing.