Question

How do i convert String www.mywebsite.com/firefox.txt to URL ? I wanted to use this in the file object and then into the FileReader constructor.

Answer 1

You can use the new URI(string) constructor (for an URI) and the new URL(string) constructor for a URL.

But that won’t work with a FileReader – it requires the URI scheme to be file:

If you want to read a remote file, you need something like:

Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(new URL(urlString).openStream(), encoding);

The encoding can be taken from HttpURLConnection obtained by url.openConnection(), but you can also set it to something specific if you know it in advance. (Btw, In the above example I’ve omitted all I/O resource management)

Note (thanks to @StephenC): the url string must be a valid URL, which means it must start with http://