Core Web Programming, Second Edition

17.5. The URL Class

The URL class provides simple access to URLs. The class automatically parses a string for you, letting you retrieve the protocol (e.g., http), host (e.g., java.sun.com), port (e.g., 80), and filename (e.g., /reports/earnings.html) separately. The URL class also provides an easy-to-use interface for reading remote files.

Reading from a URL

Although writing a client to explicitly connect to an HTTP server and retrieve a URL was quite simple, this task is so common that the Java programming language provides a helper class: java.net.URL. We saw this class when we looked at applets (see Section 9.5, “Other Applet Methods”): a URL object of this type that needed to be passed to getAppletContext().showDocument. However, the URL ...