Android get string from HTML/PHP

Question

I can't figure out how exactly to get a simple string from an url. I have tried several versions of this code:

String str = null;
    try {
        // Create a URL for the desired page
        URL url = new URL("mysite.com/thefile.txt");

        // Read all the text returned by the server
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));

        while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
            // str is one line of text; readLine() strips the newline character(s)
        }
        in.close();
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
    } catch (IOException e) {
    }
    Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), str, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

With all the proper manifest permissions but can't get to return anything. My txt file just contains

www.google.com

and I can access it from the phone or computer in any browser. Any ideas?

Niklas B. · Answer 1 · 2012-03-08T20:44:39.457

2

I'm not surprised that this doesn't tell you what's wrong, if I look at your code:

} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
} catch (IOException e) {
}

If an error occurs, you won't notice anything. Just place some kind of error reporting into theses catch branches and look at your logs. By the way, mysite.com/thefile.txt is not an URL, while http://mysite.com/thefile.txt is.

edited Mar 08 '12 at 20:44

answered Mar 08 '12 at 19:48

Niklas B.

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If I remove the catch Eclipse won't let me compile, it just says to surround with a try catch or if I try a try/finally it does that same. – Nick Mar 08 '12 at 19:59
@Nick: Well in that case you need to *handle these errors* properly. Currently, you're just *ignoring them*. Maybe print an error and exit or something. – Niklas B. Mar 08 '12 at 20:03

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

I found the answer here.

Here is the code:

Use the DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

HttpGet httppost = new HttpGet("http://www.urlOfThePageYouWantToRead.nl/text.txt");
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
        HttpEntity ht = response.getEntity();

        BufferedHttpEntity buf = new BufferedHttpEntity(ht);

        InputStream is = buf.getContent();


        BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));

        StringBuilder total = new StringBuilder();
        String line;
        while ((line = r.readLine()) != null) {
            total.append(line + "\n");
        }

        TextView.setText(total);

Android get string from HTML/PHP

2 Answers2