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Trail: Custom Networking
Lesson: Working with URLs
Working with URLs
What Is a URL?
Creating a URL
Parsing a URL
Reading Directly from a URL
Connecting to a URL
Reading from and Writing to a URLConnection
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Reading Directly from a URL

> After you've successfully created a `URL`, you can call the `URL`'s `openStream()` method to get a stream from which you can read the contents of the URL. The `openStream()` method returns a `java.io.InputStream`object, so reading from a URL is as easy as reading from an input stream.

> The following small Java program uses `openStream()` to get an input stream on the URL `http://www.yahoo.com/`. It then opens a `BufferedReader` on the input stream and reads from the `BufferedReader` thereby reading from the URL. Everything read is copied to the standard output stream:

> >     import java.net.*;
> >     import java.io.*;

> >     public class URLReader {
> >         public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
> >     	URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
> >     	BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
> >     				new InputStreamReader(
> >     				yahoo.openStream()));

> >     	String inputLine;

> >     	while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
> >     	    System.out.println(inputLine);

> >     	in.close();
> >         }
> >     }

> When you run the program, you should see, scrolling by in your command window, the HTML commands and textual content from the HTML file located at `http://www.yahoo.com/`. Alternatively, the program might hang or you might see an exception stack trace. If either of the latter two events occurs, you may have to set the proxy host so that the program can find the Yahoo server.

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