How to get URL content in Java

Reading from a URL is as easy as reading from an input stream. URL is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator . Java programs that interact with the Internet also may use URLs to find the resources on the Internet they wish to access. Java programs can use a class called URL in the java.net package to represent a URL address . A URL takes the form of a string that describes how to find a resource on the Internet. URLs have two main components: the protocol needed to access the resource and the location of the resource. The easiest way to create a URL object is from a String that represents the human-readable form of the URL address.
URL url = new URL("https://net-informations.com/");

Steps for reading URL Content from webserver:

  1. Create a URL object from the String representation.
  2. Create a new BufferedReader, using a new InputStreamReader with the URL input stream.
  3. Read the text, using readLine() API method of BufferedReader.
import java.net.*; import java.io.*; public class TestClass { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { try{ URL url = new URL("https://net-informations.com/"); BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader(url.openStream())); String line; while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) System.out.println(line); reader.close(); }catch(Exception ex){ System.out.println(ex); } } }
When you run the program, you should see the HTML commands and textual content from the HTML file located at "https://net-informations.com/" scrolling by in your command window. Or, you might see the following error message:
IOException: java.net.UnknownHostException: www.yahoo.com