Question

I already read the link checker question posted in SO. If there are more questions of this kind and I missed them, my apologies.

We need to find broken links in a website in a very easy way and scriptable way, so we can document the links that are broken. I found a blog post with some code written in java that will do exactly what I need, and my very basic knowledge let me compile it, but I get errors every time. I thought that maybe someone here might be able to direct me to why the code does not compile.

Here is the code:

import java.net.HttpURLConnection; import java.net.URL; class links {  private static boolean isLive(String link) {     HttpURLConnection urlConnection = null;     try {       URL url = new URL(link);       urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();       urlConnection.setRequestMethod('HEAD');       urlConnection.connect();       String redirectLink = urlConnection.getHeaderField('Location');       if (redirectLink != null && !url.equals(redirectLink)) {         return isLive(redirectLink);       } else {         return urlConnection.getResponseCode() == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK;       }     } catch (Exception e) {       return false;     } finally {       if (urlConnection != null) {         urlConnection.disconnect();       }     }   }    public static void main(String[] args) {     System.out.println(isLive('http://www.fakelink.net'));   } } 

Thanks to all that reply. I putting the code that compiles here, for future reference.

Answer 1

You need to have the proper packages imported. In this case, you should have the follow at the top of the file:

import java.net.HttpURLConnection; import java.net.URL; 

I’m also getting a compiler warning on the following piece of code:

 && !url.equals(redirectLink) 

It’s trying to equate url (which is a URL) to redirectLink (which is a String). In Java it will automatically compare the string value when this happens and the toString actually gives what you want. To be more precise in the authors code I would change the above code to:

 && !url.toExternalForm().equals(redirectLink) 

Note: In netbeans, you can simply right click and select the option Fix Imports (or hit Ctrl + Shift + I) and it will try to find the correct packages that you’re currently using and automatically insert the import statements.