How to get the HTTP Response code when a user has provided a invalid url.

[Pradeep Chaubey]

Dear members,

We have an application where a user will link a image to application. Sometime a user tries to associate a image which is from their own intranet and not on a open url. To handle such situation I tried to use response code from server which can be useful to handle such situation. I tried with a sample program but it throws exception and nothing is achieved. Is there any way around to get the response code from server even if a invalid URL is provided or know the reason exactly what was the problem.

My sample code to test this functionality is below :

URL url = null;
	 HttpURLConnection urlConnection = null;
	 try{
		 url = new URI("http://www.whatever12.com/").toURL();
		 urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
		 System.out.println("Response Code :"+urlConnection.getResponseCode());
		 //switch(HttpURLConnection.)
	 }catch(URISyntaxException uriSyn){
		System.out.println("1.....");
		 uriSyn.printStackTrace();
	 }catch(IOException e){
		 System.out.println("2.....");
		 e.printStackTrace();
	 }finally{
		 urlConnection.disconnect();
	 }

[Paul Clapham]

Let me just point out that if the user provides a URL which does not connect to any server, it is unreasonable to expect to get a response code. That's because the response code is what the server sends as part of its response.

[Pradeep Chaubey]

Thanks Paul. I will be using the exception type to recognize if a URL is invalid and display the appropriate error message to the user.

Thanks for your valuable opinion.

[Rob Spoor]

By the way, you don't need a URI to get a URL. You can change line 4 into this:

url = new URL("http://www.whatever12.com/");

That does mean that on line 8 you should now catch MalformedURLException instead of URISyntaxException.

[Pradeep Chaubey]

Nice catch Rob. Thank you very much indeed.

[Rob Spoor]

You're welcome.