How to scrape a photo from a Twitter Photo URL with C#

Twitter uses its url shortener to place photo’s in Tweets. I’ve tried processing these URLs in the browser, but cross site scripting measures prevented me from processing the result with jQuery.

I decided to resolve it in C# (as I’m using ASP.Net). The following script leverages a WebClient and a regular expression to extract the photo URL from the shortened URL. This code could be added to a handler or a webservice that can be called from script.

string url = "http://t.co/ecVE2qSScL";
string photoUrl = null;

//regex to get the real image
Regex regex = new Regex(
	@"data-url=""(?<PhotoUrl>[^""]+)""", 
	RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

//download the url
WebClient client = new WebClient();
var html = client.DownloadString(url);

//check for match - extract the PhotoUrl
var match = regex.Match(html);
if (match.Success)
{
	photoUrl = match.Groups["PhotoUrl"].Value;
}

The photoUrl contains the url to the photo; in this case: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiHtr_kIQAAMvx7.jpg:large.