Redirect HTTP Post

I answered a question similar to this earlier. Some of it may be helpful. You can find it at Downloading files without direct address through C# program[^].

This can be very difficult and the way I worked it was to use HttpFox within Firefox to monitor the actual HTTP requests that Firefox followed when doing this. The things that you need to watch for are the Referrer and the Cookies.

Wordpress is a bit different than in the other article, so here's what I did and using it, I was able to get the HTML of the https://en.wordpress.com site (filling in log and pwd with actual login credentials).

//Set up the request
HttpWebRequest myRequest = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(@"https://en.wordpress.com/wp-login.php");
myRequest.Referer = @"https://en.wordpress.com";
myRequest.Method = "POST";
myRequest.Host = "en.wordpress.com";

//set up the post data
string postData=@"log=username&pwd=password&testcookie=1&redirect_to=https://wordpress.com&rememberme=forever&submit";
ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
byte[] data = encoding.GetBytes(postData);
myRequest.ContentLength = data.Length;

//create the cookie container
myRequest.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();

//finish setting up the request
myRequest.ContentType ="application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
myRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = true;

//send the data
Stream newStream = myRequest.GetRequestStream();
newStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
newStream.Close();

//get the response
string pageSource = "";

using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)myRequest.GetResponse())
{
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()))
    {
        pageSource = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}