Java ImageIO.read() crashes if url contains special characters

Question

In my Java app, I want to download an image using the following:

ImageIO.read(new URL("https://www.example.com/example.png"))

It works fine most of the time, except for this url: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*XSCC_nLOSp1VJ6wXeANgCQ.png

The problem in the url is that there is an * in it. So I try the following workarounds, without any success:

replacing the * by \*
replacing the * by %2A

I always have the following error:

javax.imageio.IIOException: Can't get input stream from URL!
at javax.imageio.ImageIO.read(ImageIO.java:1395)

How can I download the image, then?

Thanks for your help.

@HenningLuther Thanks, but it doesn't encode the * unfortunately... — matteoh, Apr 24 '19 at 15:51
You could have a look at the source for ImageIO.read() and see what it does. — Steve Smith, Apr 24 '19 at 15:52
@SteveSmith It call URL.openStream(), and here is where the crash occurs. — matteoh, Apr 24 '19 at 15:54
Are you using Java 8? I get this issue on Java 8, but not on Java 11. — DragonAssassin, Apr 24 '19 at 15:58
Try using the solution as specified here https://stackoverflow.com/a/13671432/2796463. This seems to fix the issue for me. — DragonAssassin, Apr 24 '19 at 16:19
@DragonAssassin That’s definitely the issue. It’s probably worth making into an answer, with an ImageIO-compatible solution. — VGR, Apr 24 '19 at 17:22
@DragonAssassin Yes, as soon as I manage make my project work again, because it's completely upside down for the moment. — matteoh, Apr 24 '19 at 17:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 24 '19 at 17:46

The problem seems to be related to Java 8 and is fixed in Java 11. The problem with Java 8 is that a HTTP 403 code is returned.

Caused by: java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*XSCC_nLOSp1VJ6wXeANgCQ.png
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream0(HttpURLConnection.java:1894)
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1492)
at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.getInputStream(HttpsURLConnectionImpl.java:263)
at java.net.URL.openStream(URL.java:1045)
at javax.imageio.ImageIO.read(ImageIO.java:1393)

To fix this we need to set the user agent header.

URL url = new URL("https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*XSCC_nLOSp1VJ6wXeANgCQ.png");
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.95 Safari/537.11");
connection.connect();
BufferedImage bufferedImage = ImageIO.read(connection.getInputStream());

Thanks for your help. Actually, using Java 11 only solved the problem. — matteoh, Apr 24 '19 at 20:01

Java ImageIO.read() crashes if url contains special characters

1 Answers1