HttpURLConnection: Is it necessary to call connect()?

Question

Many examples I\'ve seen don\'t explicitly call connect(). Instead they just use getInputStream() or getResponseCode().

I\'m a

Answer 1

connect() is implied and automatically invoked when needed.

Answer 2

No, there are no cases. It's implicitly executed on demand. It's even specified in the documentation. Here's an extract of the URLConnection#connect() javadoc:

Operations that depend on being connected, like getContentLength, will implicitly perform the connection, if necessary.