Read url to string in few lines of java code

Question

Now that some time has passed since the original answer was accepted, there's a better approach:

String out = new Scanner(new URL("http://www.google.com").openStream(), "UTF-8").useDelimiter("\\A").next();

If you want a slightly fuller implementation, which is not a single line, do this:

public static String readStringFromURL(String requestURL) throws IOException
{
    try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(new URL(requestURL).openStream(),
            StandardCharsets.UTF_8.toString()))
    {
        scanner.useDelimiter("\\A");
        return scanner.hasNext() ? scanner.next() : "";
    }
}

This answer refers to an older version of Java. You may want to look at ccleve's answer.

---

Here is the traditional way to do this:

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class URLConnectionReader {
    public static String getText(String url) throws Exception {
        URL website = new URL(url);
        URLConnection connection = website.openConnection();
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                new InputStreamReader(
                                    connection.getInputStream()));

        StringBuilder response = new StringBuilder();
        String inputLine;

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

        in.close();

        return response.toString();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String content = URLConnectionReader.getText(args[0]);
        System.out.println(content);
    }
}

As @extraneon has suggested, ioutils allows you to do this in a very eloquent way that's still in the Java spirit:

 InputStream in = new URL( "http://jakarta.apache.org" ).openStream();

 try {
   System.out.println( IOUtils.toString( in ) );
 } finally {
   IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
 }

Or just use Apache Commons IOUtils.toString(URL url), or the variant that also accepts an encoding parameter.

Now that more time has passed, here's a way to do it in Java 8:

URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8))) {
    pageText = reader.lines().collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));
}

There's an even better way as of Java 9:

URL u = new URL("http://www.example.com/");
try (InputStream in = u.openStream()) {
    return new String(in.readAllBytes(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
}

Like the original groovy example, this assumes that the content is UTF-8 encoded. (If you need something more clever than that, you need to create a URLConnection and use it to figure out the encoding.)