Question

I am using Apache HttpClient to connect to a server for downloading a .wav file. I am using HTTP POST method in my program.

The server correctly responds with the following header and body:

> HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n Content-Disposition: attachment;
> filename=saveme1.mp3\r\n Content-Length: 6264\r\n
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary\r\n Content-Type: audio/mp3\r\n

How do I now extract the saveme1.mp3 file from the HTTP response? I am using the following code:

       ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
       byte[] data = httpclient.execute(httppost, responseHandler).getBytes();

However, I am getting garbage when I am writing the data to a file.

FileOutputStream fileoutputstream = new FileOutputStream(outputFile);
for (int i = 0; i < data.length; i++) 
        fileoutputstream.write(data[i]);

Answer 1

You are getting MIME attachment that you need to parse first. The BasicResponseHandler just return the response string, but you need the body of the attachment that contains the binary of your .mp3. You would need to do the following steps:

• Understand the MIME format. You could skim the Wikipedia Entry for gaining quick familiarity
• Once you understood, you need to create a MIME Parser. This would basically extract each part of the MIME message especially the body of your attachment. I think there should be something out there that you could reuse. You probably should look MimeMultipart. The only thing that I am not sure about it is whether it handles “binary” encoding in your message.
• Create your own extension of ResponseHandler that will utilize the MIME Parser that you have in the previous step