Question

I’m trying to do a http request in Java with the Apache Api (httpcomponents) on api.stackexchange. But this request returns text and not html.

Here is my code:

public class HttpRequestBrute {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        URIBuilder builder = new URIBuilder();
        builder.setScheme("http").setHost("api.stackexchange.com").setPath("/2.0/search")
            .setParameter("site", "stackoverflow")
            .setParameter("intitle" ,"workaround")
            .setParameter("tagged","javascript");
        URI uri = builder.build();

         HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
         try {
             HttpGet httpget1 = new HttpGet(uri);

             System.out.println("executing request " + httpget1.getURI());
             // Create a response handler
             ResponseHandler<String> responseHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
             String responseBody = httpclient.execute(httpget1, responseHandler);
             System.out.println("----------------------------------------");
             System.out.println(responseBody);
             System.out.println("----------------------------------------");

         } finally {
             httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
         }
    }
}

It’s seems to have an error in the return json value at line 1 column 19.

Exception in thread “main” com.google.gson.JsonSyntaxException: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Expected BEGIN_OBJECT but was STRING at line 1 column 19

Answer 1

The response you are getting (after hitting http://api.stackexchange.com/2.0/search?site=stackoverflow&intitle=workaround&tagged=javascript)

Its not a simple text. Its a JSON response. You will need a Java JSON parser like google-gjson to parse this.