Question

Im on quite a basic level of android development.

I would like to get text from a page such as “http://www.google.com”. (The page i will be using will only have text, so no pictures or something like that)
So, to be clear: I want to get the text written on a page into etc. a string in my application.

I tried this code, but im not even sure if it does what i want.

URL url = new URL(/*"http://www.google.com");
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
// Get the response     
BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
String line = "";

I cant get any text from it anyhow. How should I do this?

Answer 1

From the sample code you gave you are not even reading the response from the request. I would get the html with the following code

URL u = new URL("http://www.google.com");
URLConnection conn = u.openConnection();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                        new InputStreamReader(
                            conn.getInputStream()));
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) 
    buffer.append(inputLine);
in.close();
System.out.println(buffer.toString());

From there you would need to pass the string into some kind of html parser if you want only the text. From what I’ve heard JTidy would is a good library for this however I have never used any Java html parsing libraries.