Download a file with name including special characters from FTP server in C#

Question

I tried to download files, but all files with special character cannot be recognized. Other files can be downloaded, while file named `asdf#code@.pdf` cannot be downloaded. Error: The remote server returned an error: (550) File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access). In local, the file with correct name is created, but it is empty. The same thing happens on JPG files with `#` inside of the file names. how can I let them be recognized? ``` //Download the file from remote path on FTP to local path private static void Download(string remotePath, string localPath) { FtpWebRequest reqFTP; try { reqFTP = GetWebRequest(WebRequestMethods.Ftp.DownloadFile, remotePath); FileStream outputStream = new FileStream(localPath, FileMode.Create); FtpWebResponse response = (FtpWebResponse)reqFTP.GetResponse(); Stream ftpStream = response.GetResponseStream(); long cl = response.ContentLength; int bufferSize = 2048; int readCount; byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize]; readCount = ftpStream.Read(buf…

Accepted Answer

This might be by design: According to the URI standard, `#` is not a valid character in a URI. Thus, `ftp://someServer/somePath/intro_to_c#.pdf` is not a valid URI.

What you could do is to properly escape the file name when creating the URI:

```
string baseUri = "ftp://someServer/somePath/";
string file = "intro_to_c#.pdf";
string myUri = baseUri + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(file);
// yields ftp://someServer/somePath/intro_to_c%23.pdf
```

Alternatively, you could use the UriBuilder class, which handles escaping properly:

```
Uri myUri = new UriBuilder("ftp", "someServer", 21, "somePath/intro_to_c#.pdf");
// yields ftp://someServer:21/somePath/intro_to_c%23.pdf
```

Download a file with name including special characters from FTP server in C#

Solution

Problem