Trying to capture stdoutput, but Diagnostics.Process object causes process to hang

[JustinCase]

Hi, I'm trying to capture the standard output from a program called cURL.

Running the program from the command line as such:

>curl www.youtube.com

will write out the HTML page returned by YouTube.

My objective is to "capture" and manipulate this data. I read about the systems.diagnostics.process class and its ability to redirect stdoutput/stdinput and thought it would be perfect -- apparently not.

Here is the relevant code:

Diagnostics.Process curl = new Diagnostics.Process();
String response = null;
curl.StartInfo.FileName = curlPath;
curl.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
curl.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
curl.StartInfo.Arguments = "www.msn.com";
curl.start();
curl.WaitForExit(40000);
if (curl.HasExited) {
    response = curl.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd;
} else {
    curl.Kill();
}
 

When the process is started, rather than spitting out the HTML of YouTube.com, I get a meter displaying download progress. Obviously this is something built into cURL, but why is it doing it? I want the process to be ran just as it is from the command line. The major issue, though, is that cURL will just hang after downloading a few bytes.

What's going on here? Why is it behaving differently than when it's called from the command line? And how can I "simulate" the command line? I tried executing cmd.exe instead, and then writing the command "curl www.youtube.com" to stdin, but that caused even more problems...

Any help/explanation is appreciated.

[Alex Papadimoulis]

While I'm not very familiar with how cURL works, I'm curious as to why you are trying to download a page using a command line?

The WebClient class provides methods to retreive web pages from a URL in the same manner that it looks like you're using.

[Frinavale]

You can use the HttpWebRequest class to make a request to a website and retrieve the HTML for the page.

-Frinny