Get a Web Page's Title from a URL (C#)

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I was creating an app that saves URLs copied to the clipboard into an XML file.  This little bit of code came in handy so I thought I'd be worth sharing.

This code checks to make sure the URL is to a valid HTML page by first checking the type of request, then checking the header of the page.  If it is an HTML page, then the page is downloaded and a regular expression is used to pull out the <title> contents.

Example Code: GetWebPageTitle.zip

Uses namespaces: System.Net, System.Collections.Generic, System.Text.RegularExpressions

public static string GetWebPageTitle(string url)

{

   // Create a request to the url

   HttpWebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;

  

   // If the request wasn't an HTTP request (like a file), ignore it

   if (request == null) return null;

   // Use the user's credentials

   request.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

   // Obtain a response from the server, if there was an error, return nothing

   HttpWebResponse response = null;

   try { response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse; }

   catch (WebException) { return null; }

   // Regular expression for an HTML title

   string regex = @"(?<=<title.*>)([\s\S]*)(?=</title>)";

   // If the correct HTML header exists for HTML text, continue

   if (new List<string>(response.Headers.AllKeys).Contains("Content-Type"))

      if (response.Headers["Content-Type"].StartsWith("text/html"))

      {

         // Download the page

         WebClient web = new WebClient();

         web.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

         string page = web.DownloadString(url);

         // Extract the title

         Regex ex = new Regex(regex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

         return ex.Match(page).Value.Trim();

      }

   // Not a valid HTML page

   return null;

}