java.net.URL read stream to byte[]

Question

I`m trying to read an image from an URL (with the java package java.net.URL) to a byte[]. \"Everything\" works fine, except that the content isnt being ent

Answer 1

I am very surprised that nobody here has mentioned the problem of connection and read timeout. It could happen (especially on Android and/or with some crappy network connectivity) that the request will hang and wait forever.

The following code (which also uses Apache IO Commons) takes this into account, and waits max. 5 seconds until it fails:

public static byte[] downloadFile(URL url)
{
    try {
        URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
        conn.setConnectTimeout(5000);
        conn.setReadTimeout(5000);
        conn.connect(); 

        ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        IOUtils.copy(conn.getInputStream(), baos);

        return baos.toByteArray();
    }
    catch (IOException e)
    {
        // Log error and return null, some default or throw a runtime exception
    }
}