Getting the location from a WebClient on a HTTP 302 Redirect?

I have a URL that returns a HTTP 302 redirect, and I would like to get the URL it redirects to.

The problem is that System.Net.WebClient seems to actually follow it, which is bad. HttpWebRequest seems to do the same.

Is there a way to make a simple HTTP Request and get back the target Location without the WebClient following it?

I'm tempted to do raw socket commu开发者_如何学Pythonnication as HTTP is simple enough, but the site uses HTTPS and I don't want to do the Handshaking.

At the end, I don't care which class I use, I just don't want it to follow HTTP 302 Redirects :)

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It's pretty easy to do

Let's assume you've created an HttpWebRequest called myRequest

// don't allow redirects, they are allowed by default so we're going to override
myRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = false;

// send the request
HttpWebResponse response = myRequest.GetResponse();

// check the header for a Location value
if( response.Headers["Location"] == null )
{
  // null means no redirect
}
else
{
  // anything non null means we got a redirect
}

Excuse any compile errors I don't have VS right in front of me, but I've used this in the past to check for redirects.

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On HttpWebRequest you can set AllowAutoRedirect to false to handle the redirect yourself.

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The HttpWebRequest has a property AllowAutoRedirect which you can set to false (it is always true for WebClient), and then get the Location HTTP header.

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Also, for someone who just needs the new location, HttpResponseMessage has a RequestMessage property. Sometimes it can be useful, because WebClient doesn't support changing the AllowAutoRedirect property once it's been set.