Get text from web page to string

Question

I'm new to Android and I want to get the whole text from a web page to a string. I found a lot of questions like this but as I said I'm new to Android and I don't know how to use them in my app. I'm getting errors. Only one method I managed to get it to work, it uses WebView, and JavaScript and it is slow as hell. Can someone please tell me some other way to do this or how to speed up the WebView since I don't use it at all for viewing content. By the way, I've added the following code to speed up WebView

webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true); 
    webView.getSettings().setBlockNetworkImage(true);
    webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptCanOpenWindowsAutomatically(false);
    webView.getSettings().setPluginsEnabled(false);
    webView.getSettings().setSupportMultipleWindows(false);
    webView.getSettings().setSupportZoom(false);
    webView.getSettings().setSavePassword(false);
    webView.setVerticalScrollBarEnabled(false);
    webView.setHorizontalScrollBarEnabled(false);
    webView.getSettings().setAppCacheEnabled(false);
    webView.getSettings().setCacheMode(WebSettings.LOAD_NO_CACHE);

And please if you know other better and faster solution than using WebView please give me the whole source code of main activity or explain where I'm supposed to write it so I don't get errors.

Answer 1

This is the code I generally use to download a string from the internet

class RequestTask extends AsyncTask<String, String, String>{

@Override
// username, password, message, mobile
protected String doInBackground(String... url) {
    // constants
    int timeoutSocket = 5000;
    int timeoutConnection = 5000;

    HttpParams httpParameters = new BasicHttpParams();
    HttpConnectionParams.setConnectionTimeout(httpParameters, timeoutConnection);
    HttpConnectionParams.setSoTimeout(httpParameters, timeoutSocket);
    HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient(httpParameters);

    HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url[0]);

    try {
        HttpResponse getResponse = client.execute(httpget);
        final int statusCode = getResponse.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();

        if(statusCode != HttpStatus.SC_OK) {
            Log.w("MyApp", "Download Error: " + statusCode + "| for URL: " + url);
            return null;
        }

        String line = "";
        StringBuilder total = new StringBuilder();

        HttpEntity getResponseEntity = getResponse.getEntity();

        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getResponseEntity.getContent()));  

        while((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
            total.append(line);
        }

        line = total.toString();
        return line;
    } catch (Exception e) {
        Log.w("MyApp", "Download Exception : " + e.toString());
    }
    return null;
}

@Override
protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
    // do something with result
}
}

And you can run the task with

new RequestTask().execute("http://www.your-get-url.com/");