Question

So here is the problem I’m having currently…I have a ASPX script that runs on a server (let’s say http://www.myserver.com/script.aspx)…when I open up this page via my web browser I get a plain text page with some data formated like this (just one line):

Data1|Data2|Data3|...

Now I need to fetch this data in my Android app which I did like this:

URL url = new URL("http://www.myserver.com/script.aspx");
HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader((InputStream) urlConnection.getInputStream()));

String data = in.readLine();
System.out.println(data); // Just to print the result in LogCat for debug

urlConnection.disconnect();

The problem is that the resulting string only contains the letter ‘@’. No sign of my data. I have tried using other web page adresses (like google.com) to test if it’s a problem in my code…but it works…I allways get the first line of the page (usually the first html tag, since it’s a HTML web page).

I am guessing now that this is some kind of problem with the way I’m calling my ASPX script…how can I call it via Java so I get the same result as the browser (eg. the one line with my data)

Answer 1

Figured it out…I needed to set the user agent to a browser. So doing

urlConnection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2) Gecko/20100316 Firefox/3.6.2");

did the trick. The only thing I am wondering now is what user-agent would be ideal to say “I am a browser”…this seems kinda long?