Question : Should I use HTTPWebRequest or TCP sockets to retrieve XML from HTTPS link

Hello Experts,

I have been trying to solve this problem for some time now.
Our company receives an email with a HTTPS link("https://somedomain.com/Display.xml?referralID=5319582") to an XML document. When we click on the link, a dialog box pops up where we are asked to enter our username and password. After successful authentication, the XML displays in the browser window itself.

I wrote some code to automate this process through an ASP.net C# console application using the following code through HTTPWebRequest.

HttpWebRequest request = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create("https://somedomain.com/Display.xml?referralID=5319582");
            request.ContentType = "text/html";
            request.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("username","password");
             
            // Get the stream associated with the response.
            HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

But this is not working.  I get the following error: “The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden”. I am stuck here as I cannot parse the XML until I can get past this. Should I be using sockets instead?

Please advise.

Answer : Should I use HTTPWebRequest or TCP sockets to retrieve XML from HTTPS link

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

Super easy: htmlentities($string)

and to convert it back:html_entity_decode($string)