I'm not familiar with http stuff, but how would I be able to submit data to a website? There is a submit button that I would like to "press" from a console app. This is not my own website.
This is part of the page source, not sure if it has any relevance:
<form action="rate.php" method="post">
I looked at the HttpWebRequest class but I am unfamiliar with what properties I need to fill in.
Sorry I'm so vague but I'm not familiar with http.
Here is a c/p from MSDN.
// Create a request using a URL that can receive a post.
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create ("http://www.contoso.com/PostAccepter.aspx ");
// Set the Method property of the request to POST.
request.Method = "POST";
// Create POST data and convert it to a byte array.
string postData = "This is a test that posts this string to a Web server.";
byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes (postData);
// Set the ContentType property of the WebRequest.
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
// Set the ContentLength property of the WebRequest.
request.ContentLength = byteArray.Length;
// Get the request stream.
Stream dataStream = request.GetRequestStream ();
// Write the data to the request stream.
dataStream.Write (byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
// Close the Stream object.
dataStream.Close ();
// Get the response.
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse ();
// Display the status.
Console.WriteLine (((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusDescription);
// Get the stream containing content returned by the server.
dataStream = response.GetResponseStream ();
// Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader (dataStream);
// Read the content.
string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd ();
// Display the content.
Console.WriteLine (responseFromServer);
// Clean up the streams.
reader.Close ();
dataStream.Close ();
response.Close ();
link to page
The process is pretty easy but you need to first figure out what you need to send and any other special encoding/cookies/etc... that might be needed. I suggest you use Fiddler and/or Firebug for Firefox. One you can see everything taking place in a working request via the web page, then you can mimic the same behavior in your app.
you can take a look at codeproject HttpWebRequest/Response in a nutshell - Part 1
A flexible and easy to use example can be found here: C# File Upload with form fields, cookies and headers
Response.Write("hello!");
Response.End();