HttpURLConnection reading response content on 403 error [duplicate]

Question

When I fetch data from an URL with a 403 response

is = conn.getInputStream(); 

It throws an IOException and I can't get the response data.

But when I use firefox and access that url directly, The ResponseCode is still 403, but I can get the html content

Answer 1

The HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream method will return an InputStream which can be used to retrieve data from error conditions (such as a 404), according to the javadocs.