I need to obtain the HTML code for an external file(somewhere hosted on the web) (raw text would do) and then save it to a text file on my computer.

Please let me know how to proceed.

You will need the URL of the file you want to read. Then you can use the FileStream object to read the file.

  FileStream  fs = File.OpenRead(Server.MapPath("test.txt")); 
      StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(fs);

     while(sr.Peek() > -1)
       {

             // You can do whatever you want here
              Response.Write(sr.ReadLine());
      }

Once, you got the string you can use the StreamWriter to write the file on your machine.

I already had what you suggest. The problem is that using this method, it finds the virtual path to the file. What I need to read an external file.. for example.. i need to read the contents of www.hello.com/world.html

How do i specify the external path for the file?

You can use a webrequest to make a request to the url and then save the response to a text file

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.aspx

Hi

Based on my understanding, you want to retrieve the HTML from external web page and save it to file or display on the page.

There are the codes achrieving it, you can try it:

    private void saveURL(string url)
    {
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(url))
        {
            string content = "";

            System.Net.WebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(url);
            System.Net.WebResponse webResponse = webRequest.GetResponse();
            System.IO.StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(webResponse.GetResponseStream(), System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("UTF-8"));
            content = sr.ReadToEnd();
            //save to file
            StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(Server.MapPath("webcontent.txt"));
            sw.Write(content);
            sw.Flush();
            //display it in this page
            Response.Write(content);
        }
    }

You can call the method like:  saveURL("http://forums.asp.net/t/1201527.aspx"); Please pay attention on the format of URL, "http://" is necessary. Without it, you will encounter the error "The format of the URI could not be determined. "

You can get more information at: http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/dotnetWebRequest/dotnetWebRequest.htm

Hope this can help.

Thanks.. it worked

 thank you very much Vince, this helped me a lot too

just wanted to say, this is a huge help for me too... Thanks a bundle.