How can i get HTML content from a specific URL on server side by using Java ?

Question

Hi,

I am designing an application that needs to load HTML content from a specific URL on server side by using Java. How can i solve it ?

regards,

Answer 1

If it was php, you could use cURL, but since it's java, you would use HttpURLConnection, as I just found out on this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/116650/curl-equivalent-in-java

Answer 2

I have used the Apache Commons HttpClient library to do this. Have a look here: http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/tutorial.html

It is more feature rich than the JDK HTTP client support.

Answer 3

If you have some extra time, groovy has some nice build in features to do stuff like this.

Answer 4

If all you need is read the url you do not need to resort to third party libraries, java has built in support to retrieve urls.

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class URLConnectionReader {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
        URLConnection yc = yahoo.openConnection();
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                new InputStreamReader(
                                yc.getInputStream()));
        String inputLine;

        while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) 
            System.out.println(inputLine);
        in.close();
    }
}