how do I use C# to dump a web page's HTML to a text file?

I am working on a project where I need to be able to take a website url www.google.com for example and get the html for it in a text file to be parsed separately, but I don't know how to do so.

I know there is an easier way to do this than the way I'm doing it, but this is a project aimed at use and knowledge increase.

Jon Skeet
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Downloading just a single URL to a file is dead easy using WebClient:

using (var client = new WebClient())
{
    client.DownloadFile(url, filename);
}

The trickier bit is that very few web pages really consist of a single piece of HTML - most then load Javascript, or load more data with Javascript, etc.

In .NET 4.5 and later you might want to use HttpClient instead of WebClient - although it's asynchronous and (as far as I can see) doesn't provide anything quite as convenient as DownloadFile when that's all you want to do.

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