Question

I aldready succed retrieving http values from the web.

However, I still rarely have an idea how I retrieved value from the web.

I have a code. But, without understanding it, what is it for?

So… I want to ask three things to understand my code.

HTTPGet, HTTPClient, EntityUtils.

I am just guessing what HTTPGet does is grabbing http data which made by http coding.

and I am guessing HTTPClient is for data encapsulation.

and.. EntityUtils? I really dont have a idea. what is entitiy? why do I need this

to get HTTPresponse as a string? what does he do?

below is my code.

    HttpGet get = new HttpGet(tempURL); 
    HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(get); 
    String responseBody = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());    

Answer 1

When you send a HTTP request by using GET or POST method, it will send you a response. If there is nothing to send, at least the server sends the status code. As an example 200 status code stands for “OK”.

So, by using EntityUtils, or

InputStream inputStream = httpResponse.getEntity().getContent();

will give you the response in a human readable format. If you have send a request to a PHP page you will echo values as response. These are two examples for GET and POST to understand with full Android source code and PHP source code.