Question

I wonder is it possible to write a console application that will surf to a web page without opening a browser? I want to check if a web page is alive (and check for an HTML string in it), but I don’t want to open a web browser every time for this since I have a great number of web pages to check. What is the best way to go about this? I have some knowledge in java but not so much in networking with java.

any help or direction will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You want java.net.URL.getConnection():

InputStream is = null;
try{
    URL page = new URL("http://example.com/");
    URLConnection connection = page.openConnection();
    is = connection.getInputStream();
}
catch(MalformedURLException e)
{
    // ....
}
catch(IOException e)
{
    // Couldn't connect to website
}
// do something with input stream