Trying to write IP address to textbox in Visual Basic - vb.net

Question

I am trying to write a simple program that finds the public IP for the computer it is being used on. However, I am not sure how to set the text of the TextBox to the IP address that is found. Can anyone help me?
Code:
Imports System.Net
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
Public Class Form1
Private Function GetMyIP() As IPAddress
Using wc As New WebClient
Return IPAddress.Parse(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(wc.DownloadData("http://tools.feron.it/php/ip.php")))
End Using
End Function
Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
TextBox1.Text = (GetMyIP())
End Sub
Private Sub TextBox1_TextChanged(sender As Object, e As EventArgs)
End Sub
End Class

Answer 1

First, you should use Option Strict On. That would point out to you that you need to use
TextBox1.Text = GetMyIP().ToString()
Next, if you examine the headers from that web page you will see it returns the result in UTF-8 encoding, so you should use Encoding.UTF8 instead of Encoding.ASCII. Unfortunately, that still does not work - I will write more on that later.
However, WebClient has a DownloadString method which works well in this case:
Private Function GetMyIP() As IPAddress
Using wc As New WebClient
Dim url = "http://tools.feron.it/php/ip.php"
Dim x = wc.DownloadString(url)
Return IPAddress.Parse(x.Trim())
End Using
End Function
If you still want to use DownloadData, you should examine the returned bytes: you would find that the data you want is preceded by the bytes 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF. I do not know why. This is messing up the string that you want if you download it as an array of bytes.
You could use LINQ to remove the strange bytes:
Private Function GetMyIP() As IPAddress
Using wc As New WebClient
Dim url = "http://tools.feron.it/php/ip.php"
Dim x = wc.DownloadData(url)
Dim y = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(x.Where(Function(b) b < 128).ToArray())
Return IPAddress.Parse(y)
End Using
End Function
(I could have used Encoding.ASCII in there because the bytes over 127 have been removed.)