Get The Filesize Of A Url's Target File In VB.Net

Not too long ago I wrote a program that had the requirement of displaying the size of a file targetted by a URL without actually downloading the file (the filesize was to help the user determined whether or not they wanted to take the time to download the file).

I wrote a little function for Visual Basic.Net to accomplish this, and found it so darn handy that I thought I would post it here for you. Here it is:

     Public Function GetFileSize(ByVal url As String) As Long



        Dim request As System.Net.HttpWebRequest

        Dim response As System.Net.HttpWebResponse

        Dim fileSize As Long



        Try

            request = System.Net.WebRequest.Create(url)

            response = request.GetResponse()

            fileSize = response.ContentLength

            response.Close()

            Return fileSize

        Catch ex As Exception

            Return -1

        End Try



    End Function

Some related properties that you can get from an HttpWebResponse object are:

• CharacterSet - Gets the character set of the response.


• ContentEncoding - Gets the method used to encode the body of the response.


• ContentType - Gets the content type of the response.


• Cookies - Gets or set cookies associated with the response.


• LastModified - Gets the last date and time the contents of the response was modified.


• Method - Gets the method used to return the response.


• ProtocolVersion - Gets the version of the HTTP protocol used in the response.


• Server - Gets the name of the server that sent the response.

All of the above information can be extracted from the response without actually having to pull down the entire file.