Read text from URL

Byron KiourtzoglouNovember 11th, 2012Last Updated: September 25th, 2013

1 990 1 minute read

This is an example of how to parse text from a URL. The URL Class is used to represent a Uniform Resource Locator, a pointer to a “resource” on the World Wide Web. Parsing text from a URL implies that you should:

Create a URL object from the String representation.
Use openStream() API method to open a connection to this URL and and get the InputStream for reading from that connection.
Create a new BufferedReader, using a new InputStreamReader with the URL input stream.
Read the text, using readLine() API method of BufferedReader.

Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:

package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

public class ReadTextFromURL {
	
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		
		try {
			
			URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com:80/");
			
			// read text returned by server
		    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
		    
		    String line;
		    while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
		    	System.out.println(line);
		    }
		    in.close();
		    
		}
		catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			System.out.println("Malformed URL: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		catch (IOException e) {
			System.out.println("I/O Error: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		
	}

}

This was an example of how to parse text from a URL in Java.