Getting UnknownLengthHttpInputStream while getting InputStream from HttpURLConnection in android

Question

HttpURLConnection.getInputStream() gives UnknownLengthHttpInputStream and due to this Document parsing throws SAX parser exception.

Following is the code

try{
    URL url = new URL(uri);
    HttpURLConnection connection =
    (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    connection.setRequestMethod("GET");
    connection.setRequestProperty("Accept", "application/xml");

    InputStream xml = connection.getInputStream();
    System.out.println(connection.getResponseCode());
    DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = db.parse(connection.getInputStream());
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

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

Any one knows the reason for UnknownLengthHttpInputStream. I'm getting this error only in android and this code works perfectly in Java Project.

Following is the exception from LogCat:

08-08 11:07:40.490: W/System.err(1493): org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Unexpected end of document
08-08 11:07:40.504: W/System.err(1493): at org.apache.harmony.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:129)
08-08 11:07:40.510: W/System.err(1493): at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:107)
08-08 11:07:40.510: W/System.err(1493): at com.example.testws.MainActivity.onCreate(MainActivity.java:59)
08-08 11:07:40.520: W/System.err(1493): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1047)
08-08 11:07:40.520: W/System.err(1493): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1611)
08-08 11:07:40.520: W/System.err(1493): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1663)
08-08 11:07:40.520: W/System.err(1493): at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:117)
08-08 11:07:40.530: W/System.err(1493): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:931)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Its probably a Http 1.0 (old server or misconfiguration) server or no keep alive configured. In this case the length of the stream is known at the time the connection is closed from the server. Try specifying http1.1 and keep-alive in your request header (some googling will help on that). Only if the content length attribute is specified in the server response, you'll know the stream length in advance.

Workaround: read the http stream into a ByteBufferStream completely (until read() returns -1). Then throw the ByteBufferInputStream to your library (length is known now)