Java: Data Science Made Easy

Using the HttpUrlConnection class

The contents of a web page can be accessed using the HttpUrlConnection class. This is a low-level approach that requires the developer to do a lot of footwork to extract relevant content. However, he or she is able to exercise greater control over how the content is handled. In some situations, this approach may be preferable to using other API libraries.

We will demonstrate how to download the content of Wikipedia's data science page using this class. We start with a try/catch block to handle exceptions. A URL object is created using the data science URL string. The openConnection method will create a connection to the Wikipedia server as shown here:

    try {         URL url = new URL(  "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_science"); ...