How do I retrieve a URL from a web site using Java?

Question

I want to use HTTP GET and POST commands to retrieve URLs from a website and parse the HTML. How do I do this?

Answer 1

You can use HttpURLConnection in combination with URL.

URL url = new URL("http://example.com");
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
connection.connect();

InputStream stream = connection.getInputStream();
// read the contents using an InputStreamReader