Issue with Google Places API - INVALID REQUEST

Question

Current I am experiencing an issue with my code where, in the last 3 days, I have been unable to successfully complete delete requests using the Google Places API, documented here.

Up until Sunday this code would execute and run without an issue as long as the requested place met the conditions in the API, and the only responses I received were of the OK or REQUEST_DENIED form.

Now, however, whenever I send a request the only responses I receive are of the form INVALID_REQUEST, which is very inconvenient to say the least. From my understanding, and the testing I performed on this code beforehand, I am complying with the format that they are requesting, so I can't understand why this isn't working.

Can anyone else look at this code and tell me if there are any problems compared to the linked API?

public boolean delete(String reference)
{
    try
    {
        System.out.println(reference);
        String url = "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/delete/xml?sensor=false&key=API_KEY_HERE";

        String data = "<PlaceDeleteRequest>\n<reference>" + reference + "</reference>\n</PlaceDeleteRequest>";
        System.out.println(data);

        URL xmlUrl = new URL(url);
        HttpPost request = new HttpPost(xmlUrl.toURI());
        request.setEntity(new StringEntity(data));

        HttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
        HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();

        BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(entity.getContent()));

        String line = "";

        while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) 
        {
            System.out.println(line);
            if (line.contains("<status>"))
            {
                String[] s1 = line.split(">");
                String[] s2 = s1[1].split("<");
                if (s2[0].equalsIgnoreCase("ok"))
                {
                    return true;
                }
                else
                {
                    return false;
                }
            }
        }

        input.close();

    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
        return false;
    }
    return false;
}

Answer 1

Personnally, I received INVALID_REQUEST response to my Google API requests because they were not enough spaced between eachother. I had to insert a sleep for 2 seconds between them for them to work.