Read url to string in few lines of java code

Now that some time has passed since the original answer was accepted, there's a better approach:

String out = new Scanner(new URL("http://www.google.com").openStream(), "UTF-8").useDelimiter("\\A").next();

If you want a slightly fuller implementation, which is not a single line, do this:

public static String readStringFromURL(String requestURL) throws IOException{    try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(new URL(requestURL).openStream(),            StandardCharsets.UTF_8.toString()))    {        scanner.useDelimiter("\\A");        return scanner.hasNext() ? scanner.next() : "";    }}

This answer refers to an older version of Java. You may want to look at ccleve's answer.

Here is the traditional way to do this:

import java.net.*;import java.io.*;public class URLConnectionReader {    public static String getText(String url) throws Exception {        URL website = new URL(url);        URLConnection connection = website.openConnection();        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(                                new InputStreamReader(                                    connection.getInputStream()));        StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();        String inputLine;        while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)             response.append(inputLine);        in.close();        return response.toString();    }    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {        String content = URLConnectionReader.getText(args[0]);        System.out.println(content);    }}

As @extraneon has suggested, ioutils allows you to do this in a very eloquent way that's still in the Java spirit:

 InputStream in = new URL( "http://jakarta.apache.org" ).openStream(); try {   System.out.println( IOUtils.toString( in ) ); } finally {   IOUtils.closeQuietly(in); }

Or just use Apache Commons IOUtils.toString(URL url), or the variant that also accepts an encoding parameter.