Network I/O
Network I/O is generally similar to
file I/O, and both Stream and
TextReader types are used to access to data from a
network connection. The System.Net namespace
contains additional classes that are useful in dealing with common
network protocols such as HTTP, while the
System.Net.Sockets namespace contains generalized
classes for dealing with network sockets.
To create a connection to a web server,
you will typically use the abstract WebRequest
class and its Create( ) and GetResponse(
) methods. Create( ) is a static factory
method that returns a new instance of a subclass of
WebRequest to handle the URL passed in to
Create( ). GetResponse( )
returns a WebResponse object, which provides a
method called GetResponseStream( ). The
GetResponseStream( ) method returns a
Stream object, which you can wrap in a
TextReader. As you’ve already
seen, you can use a TextReader to read from an I/O
stream.
The following code snippet shows a typical sequence for creating a
connection to a network data source and displaying its contents to
the console device. StreamReader is a concrete
implementation of the abstract TextReader base
class:
WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://www.oreilly.com/");
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse( );
Stream stream = response.GetResponseStream( );
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
// Read a line at a time and write it to the console
while (reader.Peek( ) != -1) {
Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadLine( ));
}Tip
A network ...
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