http requests with powershell

Question

I am looking to make http requests to web pages with powershell, is this possible and if so, how may I achieve this?

Can I make requests to https pages? I am able to make http requests with a bat file but not https, was hoping I could https page requests with powershell.

Answer 1

You can use the usual WebRequest and HttpWebRequest classes provided by the .NET framework.

$request = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create('http://example.com')
# do something with $request

It's no different from using the same classes and APIs from C#, except for the syntactic differences to PowerShell.

PowerShell v3 also brings Invoke-WebRequest and a few others.