Reddit account creator

Question

I'm trying to make a program that will create an account on Reddit using an HttpWebRequest. I ONLY want it to do that. (I don't care about it storing a cookie or anything else.) I just want it to be a simple program where you type a username into Username_TextBox.Text and a password into Password_TextBox.Text and then click the CreateAccount_Button and voilà, new account created!

I followed a tutorial on YouTube that poorly explained how everything about a HttpWebRequest worked.

Currently, the program will create a Reddit account as long as the username hasn't been taken already. I just don't want any excess code that is useless. I want any extra code removed that isn't contributing to my goal mentioned above.

using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System;

namespace RedditAccountCreate
{
    public partial class RedditAccountCreate : Form
    {
        public RedditAccountCreate()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        CookieContainer CreateAccountCookie;

        private void CreateAccount_Button_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            string POSTData = "op=reg&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&user=" + Username_TextBox.Text + "&passwd=" + Password_TextBox.Text + "&passwd2=" + Password_TextBox.Text + "&email=&api_type=json";
            CookieContainer TemporaryCookie = new CookieContainer();
            UTF8Encoding Encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            byte[] ByteData = Encoding.GetBytes(POSTData);

            HttpWebRequest POSTRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://www.reddit.com/api/register/" + Username_TextBox.Text);
            POSTRequest.Method = "POST";
            POSTRequest.KeepAlive = true;
            POSTRequest.CookieContainer = TemporaryCookie;
            POSTRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
            POSTRequest.Referer = "http://www.reddit.com/";
            POSTRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36";
            POSTRequest.ContentLength = ByteData.Length;

            Stream POSTRequestStream = POSTRequest.GetRequestStream();
            POSTRequestStream.Write(ByteData, 0, ByteData.Length);
            POSTRequestStream.Close();
            HttpWebResponse POSTResponse = default(HttpWebResponse);

            POSTResponse = (HttpWebResponse)POSTRequest.GetResponse();
            TemporaryCookie.Add(POSTResponse.Cookies);
            CreateAccountCookie = TemporaryCookie;
            StreamReader POSTRequestReader = new StreamReader(POSTResponse.GetResponseStream());

            string POSTRequestCode = POSTRequestReader.ReadToEnd();
        }

    }
}

Here's the link to the YouTube tutorial that I followed, in case anyone wants it.

Answer 1

Some points about your code

• extract the code to create an account to a separate class. In this way you can reuse it without problems. This can even be a static method.

• variables should be named using camelCase casing. See the naming guidelines.

• as you don't use neither the TemporaryCookie nor the CreateAccountCookie you should remove these varaibles.

• the assignment of POSTRequest.KeepAlive = true; is superflous because the default of the KeepAlive property is true.

• string POSTRequestCode = POSTRequestReader.ReadToEnd(); is superflous because it is never used.

• because Stream is implementing IDisposable you should enclose it in a using statement. This will take care that the Stream is closed and disposed.

• you don't use the HttpWebResponse POSTResponse so you can remove it too

Implementing the mentioned points will lead to:

private static string postDataToFormat = "op=reg&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F&user={0}&passwd={1}&passwd2={1}&email=&api_type=json";
public static void CreateRedditAccount(string userName, string passWord)
{
    string postData = string.Format(postDataToFormat, userName, passWord); 

    UTF8Encoding Encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
    byte[] postValue = Encoding.GetBytes(postData);

    HttpWebRequest POSTRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://www.reddit.com/api/register/" + userName);
    POSTRequest.Method = System.Net.WebRequestMethods.Http.Post;
    POSTRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    POSTRequest.Referer = "http://www.reddit.com/";
    POSTRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36";
    POSTRequest.ContentLength = postValue.Length;

    using (Stream POSTRequestStream = POSTRequest.GetRequestStream())
    {
        POSTRequestStream.Write(postValue, 0, postValue.Length);
    }

}