HttpURLConnection reading response content on 403 error [duplicate]

Answer 1

Usage example of HttpURLConnection :

String response = null;
try {
    URL url = new URL("http://google.com/pagedoesnotexist");
    HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

    // Hack to force HttpURLConnection to run the request
    // Otherwise getErrorStream always returns null
    connection.getResponseCode();
    InputStream stream = connection.getErrorStream();
    if (stream == null) {
        stream = connection.getInputStream();
    }
    // This is a try with resources, Java 7+ only
    // If you use Java 6 or less, use a finally block instead
    try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(stream)) {
        scanner.useDelimiter("\\Z");
        response = scanner.next();
    }
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
    // Replace this with your exception handling
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // Replace this with your exception handling
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 2

try this:

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getResponseCode() / 100 == 2 ? con.getInputStream() : con.getErrorStream()));

source https://stackoverflow.com/a/30712213/505623

Answer 3

try something like this:

try {
    String text = "url";
    URL url = new URL(text);
    URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
    // fake request coming from browser
    conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB;     rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
    String f = in.readLine();
    in.close();
    System.out.println(f);
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 4

I got the same error even after adding agent string. Finally after a days investigation figured out the issue. It is really weired if the url scheme start with "HTTPS" it results in error 403. It should be in lowercase ("https"). So make sure you call "url.toLowercase()" before opening the connection

Answer 5

The HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream method will return an InputStream which can be used to retrieve data from error conditions (such as a 404), according to the javadocs.