HttpURLConnection - getting the response content

[Steve Watson]

I am trying to call a URL with HttpURLConnection and retrieve the HTML that comes back as a String. eg.:

URL url = new URL("http://www.amazon.com");
HttpURLConnection connection = new HttpURLConnection(url);
connection.connect();

then what do I do?

[Joe Ess]

getContent() or getInputStream(). You don't have to call connect() explicity, as it is called when a method which requires a connection (i.e. the aformentioned methods) is invoked.
You could cut out the middleman and just use url.getInputStream() if you aren't using any HTTP specific features (i.e. POST).

[Steve Watson]

Thanks your reply. getContent() returns an Object and getInputStream() returns an InputStream - how do I get a string of the HTML out of those?

[Joe Ess]

The Java Tutorial has a section on Input Streams. You should take a gander. Read from the InputStream, save the result to some intermediary like a StringBuffer or a StringWriter. When you are done reading, the intermediary will contain all the HTML. When you are comfortable with that, take a look at improving efficiency by using a BufferedReader.

[Steve Watson]

Thanks.