Quickly and accurately grabbing webpage titles

I'm looking to get the title of a webpage, a common feature of many IRC bots that I'm wanting to incorporate into a IRC client I'm writing for fun.

The method that I currently have working basically connects and sends a GET request for the entire webpage then seeks out the tags and reads inbetween them. For larger webpages this can be slower than I'd like. An additional problem I've noticed is webpages with dynamic titles (such as so开发者_StackOverflowme phpbb forums) will not return the accurate title as it would show in a browser because I don't do any execution of javascript ect..

It seems one way to get an accurate title is to dump the html into a browser control (such as the IE COM control) and pull the title, but this is just going to make it even more time consuming.

Is there a simple method I am un aware of?

In a word, no, not really.

I guess rather than downloading the whole document you could stream the HTTP file into your application and just stop downloading when you reach </title> - that would save you waiting for the whole HTML document to download.

However that doesn't help the situation if you need to read the title after it's been changed by some client-side javascript. As you say, the only way I can think of doing that is by using a browser control.