Working with URLs

Connecting to a URL

After you've successfully created a URL object, you can call the URL object's openConnection method to connect to it. When you connect to a URL, you are initializing a communication link between your Java program and the URL over the network. For example, you can open a connection to the Yahoo site with the following code:

try {
    URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
    yahoo.openConnection();
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {     // new URL() failed
    . . .
} catch (IOException e) {               // openConnection() failed
    . . .
}

If possible, the openConnection method creates a new URLConnection (if an appropriate one does not already exist), initializes it, connects to the URL, and returns the URLConnection object. If something goes wrong--for example, the Yahoo server is down--then the openConnection method throws an IOException.

Now that you've successfully connected to your URL, you can use the URLConnection object to perform actions such as reading from or writing to the connection. The next section shows you how.

Working with URLs