How to build a query string for a URL in C#?

Question

A common task when calling web resources from a code is building a query string to including all the necessary parameters. While by all means no rocket science, there are some nifty details you need to take care of like, appending an & if not the first parameter, encoding the parameters etc.

The code to do it is very simple, but a bit tedious:

StringBuilder SB = new StringBuilder();
if (NeedsToAddParameter A) 
{ 
  SB.Append("A="); SB.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfA")); 
}

if (NeedsToAddParameter B) 
{
  if (SB.Length>0) SB.Append("&"); 
  SB.Append("B="); SB.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfB")); }
}

This is such a common task one would expect a utility class to exist that makes it more elegant and readable. Scanning MSDN, I failed to find one—which brings me to the following question:

What is the most elegant clean way you know of doing the above?

Answer 1

    public static string ToQueryString(this Dictionary<string, string> source)
    {
        return String.Join("&", source.Select(kvp => String.Format("{0}={1}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(kvp.Key), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(kvp.Value))).ToArray());
    }

    public static string ToQueryString(this NameValueCollection source)
    {
        return String.Join("&", source.Cast<string>().Select(key => String.Format("{0}={1}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(key), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(source[key]))).ToArray());
    }

Answer 2

The code below is taken off the HttpValueCollection implementation of ToString, via ILSpy, which gives you a name=value querystring.

Unfortunately HttpValueCollection is an internal class which you only ever get back if you use HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(). I removed all the viewstate parts to it, and it encodes by default:

public static class HttpExtensions
{
    public static string ToQueryString(this NameValueCollection collection)
    {
        // This is based off the NameValueCollection.ToString() implementation
        int count = collection.Count;
        if (count == 0)
            return string.Empty;

        StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
        {
            string text = collection.GetKey(i);
            text = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text);
            string value = (text != null) ? (text + "=") : string.Empty;
            string[] values = collection.GetValues(i);
            if (stringBuilder.Length > 0)
            {
                stringBuilder.Append('&');
            }
            if (values == null || values.Length == 0)
            {
                stringBuilder.Append(value);
            }
            else
            {
                if (values.Length == 1)
                {
                    stringBuilder.Append(value);
                    string text2 = values[0];
                    text2 = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text2);
                    stringBuilder.Append(text2);
                }
                else
                {
                    for (int j = 0; j < values.Length; j++)
                    {
                        if (j > 0)
                        {
                            stringBuilder.Append('&');
                        }
                        stringBuilder.Append(value);
                        string text2 = values[j];
                        text2 = HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode(text2);
                        stringBuilder.Append(text2);
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        return stringBuilder.ToString();
    }
}

Answer 3

Here's my late entry. I didn't like any of the others for various reasons, so I wrote my own.

This version features:

• Use of StringBuilder only. No ToArray() calls or other extension methods. It doesn't look as pretty as some of the other responses, but I consider this a core function so efficiency is more important than having "fluent", "one-liner" code which hide inefficiencies.

• Handles multiple values per key. (Didn't need it myself but just to silence Mauricio ;)

  public string ToQueryString(NameValueCollection nvc)
  {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder("?");
  
      bool first = true;
  
      foreach (string key in nvc.AllKeys)
      {
          foreach (string value in nvc.GetValues(key))
          {
              if (!first)
              {
                  sb.Append("&");
              }
  
              sb.AppendFormat("{0}={1}", Uri.EscapeDataString(key), Uri.EscapeDataString(value));
  
              first = false;
          }
      }
  
      return sb.ToString();
  }
  

Example Usage

        var queryParams = new NameValueCollection()
        {
            { "x", "1" },
            { "y", "2" },
            { "foo", "bar" },
            { "foo", "baz" },
            { "special chars", "? = &" },
        };

        string url = "http://example.com/stuff" + ToQueryString(queryParams);

        Console.WriteLine(url);

Output

http://example.com/stuff?x=1&y=2&foo=bar&foo=baz&special%20chars=%3F%20%3D%20%26

Answer 4

I went with the solution proposed by DSO (answered on Aug 2 '11 at 7:29), his solution does not require using HttpUtility. However, as per an article posted in Dotnetpearls, using a Dictionary is faster (in performance) than using NameValueCollection. Here is DSO's solution modified to use Dictionary in place of NameValueCollection.

    public static Dictionary<string, string> QueryParametersDictionary()
    {
        var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();
        dictionary.Add("name", "John Doe");
        dictionary.Add("address.city", "Seattle");
        dictionary.Add("address.state_code", "WA");
        dictionary.Add("api_key", "5352345263456345635");

        return dictionary;
    }

    public static string ToQueryString(Dictionary<string, string> nvc)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        bool first = true;

        foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> pair in nvc)
        {
                if (!first)
                {
                    sb.Append("&");
                }

                sb.AppendFormat("{0}={1}", Uri.EscapeDataString(pair.Key), Uri.EscapeDataString(pair.Value));

                first = false;
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }

Answer 5

You can create a new writeable instance of HttpValueCollection by calling System.Web.HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty), and then use it as any NameValueCollection. Once you have added the values you want, you can call ToString on the collection to get a query string, as follows:

NameValueCollection queryString = System.Web.HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty);

queryString["key1"] = "value1";
queryString["key2"] = "value2";

return queryString.ToString(); // Returns "key1=value1&key2=value2", all URL-encoded

The HttpValueCollection is internal and so you cannot directly construct an instance. However, once you obtain an instance you can use it like any other NameValueCollection. Since the actual object you are working with is an HttpValueCollection, calling ToString method will call the overridden method on HttpValueCollection, which formats the collection as a URL-encoded query string.

After searching SO and the web for an answer to a similar issue, this is the most simple solution I could find.

.NET Core

If you're working in .NET Core, you can use the Microsoft.AspNetCore.WebUtilities.QueryHelpers class, which simplifies this greatly.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.aspnetcore.webutilities.queryhelpers

Answer 6

Assuming that you want to reduce dependencies to other assemblies and to keep things simple, you can do:

var sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();

sb.Append("a=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfA") + "&");
sb.Append("b=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfB") + "&");
sb.Append("c=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfC") + "&");
sb.Append("d=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode("TheValueOfD") + "&");

sb.Remove(sb.Length-1, 1); // Remove the final '&'

string result = sb.ToString();

This works well with loops too. The final ampersand removal needs to go outside of the loop.

Note that the concatenation operator is used to improve readability. The cost of using it compared to the cost of using a StringBuilder is minimal (I think Jeff Atwood posted something on this topic).