Submit html form with textarea

Question

It is a WindowsForm application. I used C# code to get the HTML string from a website successfully.

Inside the HTML code, the form looks like this:

<form id="editform" name="editform" method="post" action="/blablabla/index.php?title=title1&action=submit" enctype="multipart/form-data">    
    <textarea tabindex='1' accesskey="," name="Textbox1" id="Textbox1" rows='25' cols='80' >
    item1;
    item2;
    ....

    </textarea>
    <input id="wpSave" name="wpSave" type="submit" tabindex="5" value="Save page" accesskey="s" title="Save your changes" />
</form>

I tried to use

HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();
...

these ways to get the text inside "textarea" successfully, but I am stuck on submitting the edited text to the original website. To clarify, I want to edit a textarea inside an HTML form of a website using my WinForm Application, and submit it.

What is the best way to use C# to modify the text inside "textarea", and submit the changed text to the original website? Thank you.

What are you planning on doing with the edited HTML? What is submitting to the original website? Do you want to change the contents of the website, or are you just trying to fill in the form using C# and post that to blablabla/index? — Hespen, Nov 11 '16 at 20:02
So, do you want to mimic the submission of the form via a C# application? And with this application, be able to send whatever "text" that would originally be sent via the `textarea`? — justderb, Nov 21 '16 at 20:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

Modified from https://stackoverflow.com/a/19983672/1178781:

public static string postTextAre(string text, string postUrl) {
    HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();
    MultipartFormDataContent form = new MultipartFormDataContent();

    form.Add(new StringContent(text), "Textbox1");
    form.Add(new StringContent("Save page"), "wpSave");
    HttpResponseMessage response = await httpClient.PostAsync(postUrl, form);

    response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
    httpClient.Dispose();
    return response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
}

If you do not want to use HttpClient, you can re-used the anser for https://stackoverflow.com/a/20000831/1178781 and just tweak the code so it doesn't upload a picture - just submit the value for Textbox1.

Submit html form with textarea

1 Answers1