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

This is another (maybe redundant :-]) way for do that.

The conceptuals are the same of the Vedran answer in this page (take a look here).

But this class is more efficient, because it iterate through all Keys only one time: when ToString is invoked.

The formatting code is also semplified and improved.

Hope that could be helpful.

public sealed class QueryStringBuilder
{
    public QueryStringBuilder()
    {
        this.inner = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty);
    }

    public QueryStringBuilder(string queryString)
    {
        this.inner = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString);
    }

    public QueryStringBuilder(string queryString, Encoding encoding)
    {
        this.inner = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(queryString, encoding);
    }

    private readonly NameValueCollection inner;

    public QueryStringBuilder AddKey(string key, string value)
    {
        this.inner.Add(key, value);
        return this;
    }

    public QueryStringBuilder RemoveKey(string key)
    {
        this.inner.Remove(key);
        return this;
    }

    public QueryStringBuilder Clear()
    {
        this.inner.Clear();
        return this;
    }

    public override String ToString()
    {
        if (this.inner.Count == 0)
            return string.Empty;

        var builder = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < this.inner.Count; i++)
        {
            if (builder.Length > 0)
                builder.Append('&');

            var key = this.inner.GetKey(i);
            var values = this.inner.GetValues(i);

            if (key == null || values == null || values.Length == 0)
                continue;

            for (int j = 0; j < values.Length; j++)
            {
                if (j > 0)
                    builder.Append('&');

                builder.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode(key));
                builder.Append('=');
                builder.Append(HttpUtility.UrlEncode(values[j]));
            }
        }

        return builder.ToString();
    }
}

Answer 2

If you look under the hood the QueryString property is a NameValueCollection. When I've done similar things I've usually been interested in serialising AND deserialising so my suggestion is to build a NameValueCollection up and then pass to:

using System.Web;
using System.Collections.Specialized;

private string ToQueryString(NameValueCollection nvc)
{
    var array = (from key in nvc.AllKeys
        from value in nvc.GetValues(key)
        select string.Format("{0}={1}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(key), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(value)))
        .ToArray();
    return "?" + string.Join("&", array);
}

Possibly I could've formatted that better :)

I imagine there's a super elegant way to do this in LINQ too...

Answer 3

Flurl [disclosure: I'm the author] supports building query strings via anonymous objects (among other ways):

var url = "http://www.some-api.com".SetQueryParams(new
{
    api_key = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SomeApiKey"],
    max_results = 20,
    q = "Don't worry, I'll get encoded!"
});

The optional Flurl.Http companion lib allows you to do HTTP calls right off the same fluent call chain, extending it into a full-blown REST client:

T result = await "https://api.mysite.com"
    .AppendPathSegment("person")
    .SetQueryParams(new { ap_key = "my-key" })
    .WithOAuthBearerToken("MyToken")
    .PostJsonAsync(new { first_name = firstName, last_name = lastName })
    .ReceiveJson<T>();

The full package is available on NuGet:

PM> Install-Package Flurl.Http

or just the stand-alone URL builder:

PM> Install-Package Flurl

Answer 4

[Also late entry]

Chain-able wrapper class for HttpValueCollection:

namespace System.Web.Mvc {
    public class QueryStringBuilder {
        private NameValueCollection collection;
        public QueryStringBuilder() {
            collection = System.Web.HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(string.Empty);
        }
        public QueryStringBuilder Add(string key, string value) {
            collection.Add(key, value);
            return this;
        }
        public QueryStringBuilder Remove(string key) {
            collection.Remove(key);
            return this;
        }
        public string this[string key] {
            get { return collection[key]; }
            set { collection[key] = value; }
        }
        public string ToString() {
            return collection.ToString();
        }
    }
}

Example usage:

QueryStringBuilder parameters = new QueryStringBuilder()
    .Add("view", ViewBag.PageView)
    .Add("page", ViewBag.PageNumber)
    .Add("size", ViewBag.PageSize);
string queryString = parameters.ToString();

Answer 5

My offering:

public static Uri AddQuery(this Uri uri, string name, string value)
{
    // this actually returns HttpValueCollection : NameValueCollection
    // which uses unicode compliant encoding on ToString()
    var query = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(uri.Query);

    query.Add(name, value);

    var uriBuilder = new UriBuilder(uri)
    {
        Query = query.ToString()
    };

    return uriBuilder.Uri;
}

Usage:

var uri = new Uri("http://stackoverflow.com").AddQuery("such", "method")
                                             .AddQuery("wow", "soFluent");

// http://stackoverflow.com?such=method&wow=soFluent

Answer 6

A quick extension method based version:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var parameters = new List<KeyValuePair<string, string>>
                             {
                                 new KeyValuePair<string, string>("A", "AValue"),
                                 new KeyValuePair<string, string>("B", "BValue")
                             };

        string output = "?" + string.Join("&", parameters.ConvertAll(param => param.ToQueryString()).ToArray());
    }
}

public static class KeyValueExtensions
{
    public static string ToQueryString(this KeyValuePair<string, string> obj)
    {
        return obj.Key + "=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(obj.Value);
    }
}

You could use a where clause to select which parameters get added to the string.