How to build URIs with the UriBuilder class in C#

You can normally use the URI object to construct URIs in C#. However, there’s an object called UriBuilder which lets you build up a URI from various elements.

Here’s an example to construct a simple HTTP address with a scheme, a host and a path:

UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder();
uriBuilder.Scheme = "http";
uriBuilder.Host = "cnn.com";
uriBuilder.Path = "americas";
Uri uri = uriBuilder.Uri;

uri will be “http://cnn.com/americas”

…and here’s en extended example for more complex URIs with a port number, a query string, a username and a password:

UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder();
uriBuilder.Scheme = "http";
uriBuilder.Host = "www.cnn.com";
uriBuilder.Path = "americas";
uriBuilder.Port = 8089;
uriBuilder.UserName = "andras";
uriBuilder.Password = "secret";
uriBuilder.Query = "search=usa";

uri will be “http://andras:secret@www.cnn.com:8089/americas?search=usa”

You can even build URIs that point to a file:

UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder();
uriBuilder.Scheme = "c";
uriBuilder.Host = @"temp";
uriBuilder.Path = "log.txt";

…where uri will become “file:///c://temp/log.txt”.

Here’s an example to build a UNC path if you’d like a URI that points to a file share:

UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder();
uriBuilder.Scheme = "file";
uriBuilder.Host = @"fileshare";
uriBuilder.Path = "log.txt";

…where uri will become “file://fileshare/log.txt”.

View all various C# language feature related posts here.