How to judge whether a webpage existed in a fast way

---
date: Mar 09, 2016
tags:
- C#
language: English
---

Recently I am coding a app for viewing newspaper. Because there are no API, I have to manually find whether the page ever existed. So I try to look on the Internet, and find a try catch way to judge it:

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HttpWebResponse response = null;
var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(/* url */);
request.Method = “HEAD”;

try{
response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
}
catch (WebException ex){
/* A WebException will be thrown if the status of the response is not `200 OK` */
}
finally{
// Don’t forget to close your response.
if (response != null)
{
response.Close()
}
}

However, I find that GetResponse method now no longer existed in .NET framework 4.5.2. So I find a another one that worked. But it is very slow. So I come up with an idea-using the HTTP head to find out whether it exists, and it is a lot faster:

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HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();

//Getting the Web Response.
HttpResponseMessage httpResponse = new HttpResponseMessage();
HttpRequestMessage request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, new Uri(website));
httpResponse = await httpClient.SendRequestAsync(request);
if(httpResponse.ToString().Contains(“StatusCode: 404”)){
// do something when the page doesn’t exist
}

real working code
real working code

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