Using Java to pull data from a webpage?

Question

I'm attempting to make my first program in Java. The goal is to write a program that browses to a website and downloads a file for me. However, I don't know how to use Java to interact with the internet. Can anyone tell me what topics to look up/read about or recommend some good resources?

Answer 1

The simplest solution (without depending on any third-party library or platform) is to create a URL instance pointing to the web page / link you want to download, and read the content using streams.

For example:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;


public class DownloadPage {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        // Make a URL to the web page
        URL url = new URL("http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6159118/using-java-to-pull-data-from-a-webpage");

        // Get the input stream through URL Connection
        URLConnection con = url.openConnection();
        InputStream is =con.getInputStream();

        // Once you have the Input Stream, it's just plain old Java IO stuff.

        // For this case, since you are interested in getting plain-text web page
        // I'll use a reader and output the text content to System.out.

        // For binary content, it's better to directly read the bytes from stream and write
        // to the target file.


        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));

        String line = null;

        // read each line and write to System.out
        while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
            System.out.println(line);
        }
    }
}

Hope this helps.