GET/POST request with HttpURLConnection in Java

In this tutorial will cover how to do GET and POST request using HttpURLConnection class from Java without any 3rd party library.

First, we need a test server and for this I will use httpbin.org. This test server contains a lot of useful endpoints for testing. In this tutorial will use 2 of them:

• http://httpbin.org/get
• http://httpbin.org/post

For the User-Agent header I will use an random agent picked up from useragentstring.com.

Example

package com.admfactory.http;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.DataOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;

public class HttpURLConnectionExample {

    private static final String USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36";

    public void post(String url, String params) throws Exception {
	String result = null;

	URL obj = new URL(url);
	HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) obj.openConnection();

	con.setRequestMethod("POST");
	con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", USER_AGENT);

	con.setDoOutput(true);
	DataOutputStream wr = new DataOutputStream(con.getOutputStream());
	wr.writeBytes(params);
	wr.flush();
	wr.close();

	int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();
	System.out.println("'POST' request to URL : " + url);
	System.out.println("Response Code : " + responseCode);

	System.out.println("Response Body : ");
	BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));
	String inputLine;
	StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer();

	while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
	    response.append(inputLine);
	}
	in.close();

	result = response.toString();
	System.out.println(result);

    }

    public void get(String url, String params) throws Exception {
	String result = null;

	URL obj = new URL(url + "?" + params);
	HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) obj.openConnection();

	con.setRequestMethod("GET");

	con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", USER_AGENT);

	int responseCode = con.getResponseCode();
	System.out.println("'GET' request to URL : " + url);
	System.out.println("Response Code : " + responseCode);

	System.out.println("Response Body : ");
	BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));
	String inputLine;
	StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer();

	while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
	    response.append(inputLine);
	}
	in.close();

	result = response.toString();
	System.out.println(result);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
	try {
	    HttpURLConnectionExample example = new HttpURLConnectionExample();
	    String getUrl = "http://httpbin.org/get";

	    System.out.println("HttpURLConnection Examples:");
	    System.out.println();
	    example.get(getUrl, "param1=123&param2=abc");
	    System.out.println();

	    String postUrl = "http://httpbin.org/post";
	    example.post(postUrl, "param3=345&param4=ert");

	} catch (Exception e) {
	    e.printStackTrace();
	}
    }
}

If you need to call an HTTPS service then HttpsURLConnection need to be used instead of HttpURLConnection.

Output

HttpURLConnection Examples:

'GET' request to URL : http://httpbin.org/get
Response Code : 200
Response Body : 
{  "args": {    "param1": "123",     "param2": "abc"  },   "headers": {    "Accept": "text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2",     "Cache-Control": "max-age=259200",     "Host": "httpbin.org",     "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36"  },   "url": "http://httpbin.org/get?param1=123&param2=abc"}

'POST' request to URL : http://httpbin.org/post
Response Code : 200
Response Body : 
{  "args": {},   "data": "",   "files": {},   "form": {    "param3": "345",     "param4": "ert"  },   "headers": {    "Accept": "text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2",     "Cache-Control": "max-age=259200",     "Content-Length": "21",     "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",     "Host": "httpbin.org",     "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36"  },   "json": null,   "url": "http://httpbin.org/post"}

Note: Your response will be longer that my output. I removed some data that contains my IP address.

References

• httpbin.org
• HttpURLConnection
• User Agent