Simplest way to read JSON from a URL in Java

Question

Using the Maven artifact org.json:json I got the following code, which I think is quite short. Not as short as possible, but still usable.

package so4308554;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.net.URL;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

public class JsonReader {

  private static String readAll(Reader rd) throws IOException {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    int cp;
    while ((cp = rd.read()) != -1) {
      sb.append((char) cp);
    }
    return sb.toString();
  }

  public static JSONObject readJsonFromUrl(String url) throws IOException, JSONException {
    InputStream is = new URL(url).openStream();
    try {
      BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
      String jsonText = readAll(rd);
      JSONObject json = new JSONObject(jsonText);
      return json;
    } finally {
      is.close();
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, JSONException {
    JSONObject json = readJsonFromUrl("https://graph.facebook.com/19292868552");
    System.out.println(json.toString());
    System.out.println(json.get("id"));
  }
}

Here are couple of alternatives versions with Jackson (since there are more than one ways you might want data as):

  ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); // just need one
  // Got a Java class that data maps to nicely? If so:
  FacebookGraph graph = mapper.readValue(url, FaceBookGraph.class);
  // Or: if no class (and don't need one), just map to Map.class:
  Map<String,Object> map = mapper.readValue(url, Map.class);

And specifically the usual (IMO) case where you want to deal with Java objects, can be made one liner:

FacebookGraph graph = new ObjectMapper().readValue(url, FaceBookGraph.class);

Other libs like Gson also support one-line methods; why many examples show much longer sections is odd. And even worse is that many examples use obsolete org.json library; it may have been the first thing around, but there are half a dozen better alternatives so there is very little reason to use it.

The easiest way: Use gson, google's own goto json library. https://code.google.com/p/google-gson/

Here is a sample. I'm going to this free geolocator website and parsing the json and displaying my zipcode. (just put this stuff in a main method to test it out)

    String sURL = "http://freegeoip.net/json/"; //just a string

    // Connect to the URL using java's native library
    URL url = new URL(sURL);
    URLConnection request = url.openConnection();
    request.connect();

    // Convert to a JSON object to print data
    JsonParser jp = new JsonParser(); //from gson
    JsonElement root = jp.parse(new InputStreamReader((InputStream) request.getContent())); //Convert the input stream to a json element
    JsonObject rootobj = root.getAsJsonObject(); //May be an array, may be an object. 
    String zipcode = rootobj.get("zip_code").getAsString(); //just grab the zipcode

If you don't mind using a couple libraries it can be done in a single line.

Include Apache Commons IOUtils & json.org libraries.

JSONObject json = new JSONObject(IOUtils.toString(new URL("https://graph.facebook.com/me"), Charset.forName("UTF-8")));

Maven dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
  <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
  <version>2.7</version>
</dependency>