Question

I am trying to use java to create HTTP requests, but I am getting an invalid method and I don’t know why. Here is my code:

String str = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: " + this.url + "\r\n";
int i=r.nextInt(agents.length);
String uAgent = agents[i]; //agents is an array of user agents.
  str = str + "User-Agent: "+uAgent+"\r\n";
  str = str + "Content-Length: " + (int)(Math.random() * 1000.0D) + "\r\n"; //random content length for now
  str = str + "X-a: " + (int)(Math.random() * 1000.0D) + "\r\n"; //random

 HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(this.url).openConnection();
 con.setRequestMethod(str);
 con.setConnectTimeout(5000); //set timeout to 5 seconds
 con.connect();
 System.out.print(".");

The error I am getting is this:

java.net.ProtocolException: Invalid HTTP method: GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: http://example.com/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US)
Content-Length: 434
X-a: 660   
    at java.net.HttpURLConnection.setRequestMethod(HttpURLConnection.java:339)
    at jbot.HTTP.run(HTTP.java:88)

It seems like I am using a valid method, so I don’t know.

Answer 1

An HTTP request method is just one word: “GET”, “POST”, etc. The other lines are request headers which you can set using setRequestProperty. For example:

con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", uAgent);