Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

URL

Synopsis

This class represents a uniform resource locator and allows the data referred to by the URL to be downloaded. A URL can be specified as a single string or with separate protocol, host, port, and file specifications. Relative URLs can also be specified with a String and the URL object to which it is relative. getFile( ) , getHost( ), getProtocol( ) and related methods return the various portions of the URL specified by a URL object. sameFile( ) determines whether a URL object refers to the same file as this one. getDefaultPort( ) returns the default port number for the protocol of the URL object; it may differ from the number returned by getPort( ) . Use openConnection( ) to obtain a URLConnection object with which you can download the content of the URL. In Java 5.0, you can explicitly specify a Proxy object through which the connection should be opened. For simple cases, however, the URL class defines shortcut methods that create and invoke methods on a URLConnection internally. getContent( ) downloads the URL data and parses it into an appropriate Java object (such as a string or image) if an appropriate ContentHandler can be found. In Java 1.3 and later, you can pass an array of Class objects that specify the type of objects that you are willing to accept as the return value of this method. If you wish to parse the URL content yourself, call openStream( ) to obtain an InputStream from which you can read the data.

Figure 12-27. java.net.URL

public final class ...