A java program that isn't behaving as it should be... please help.

Question

I am trying to get the following code to work but it isn't playing ball.
I basically want it to download the file from the following url:
http://www.ecb.int/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref.zip
But all this seems to do is create the empty zip...
Could someone please let me know why they think this is not downloading the actual zip?
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
* Command line program to download data from URLs and save
* it to local files. Run like this:
* java FileDownload http://schmidt.devlib.org/java/file-download.html
* @author Marco Schmidt
public class FileDownload {
     public static void download(String address, String localFileName) {
          OutputStream out = null;
          URLConnection conn = null;
          InputStream  in = null;
          try {
               URL url = new URL(address);
               out = new BufferedOutputStream(
                    new FileOutputStream(localFileName));
               conn = url.openConnection();
               in = conn.getInputStream();
               byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
               int numRead;
               long numWritten = 0;
               while ((numRead = in.read(buffer)) != -1) {
                    out.write(buffer, 0, numRead);
                    numWritten += numRead;
               System.out.println(localFileName + "\t" + numWritten);
          } catch (Exception exception) {
               exception.printStackTrace();
          } finally {
               try {
                    if (in != null) {
                         in.close();
                    if (out != null) {
                         out.close();
               } catch (IOException ioe) {
     public static void download(String address) {
          int lastSlashIndex = address.lastIndexOf('/');
          if (lastSlashIndex >= 0 &&
              lastSlashIndex < address.length() - 1) {
               download(address, address.substring(lastSlashIndex + 1));
          } else {
               System.err.println("Could not figure out local file name for " +
                    address);
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
               download(args<i>);

Answer 1

Hello Mendez,
it is hard to say what the problem is in your case, but my guess is that you are trying to download from some location where you don't normally connect to the internet directly but access URLs via a proxy server.
In that case you would have to replace the fourth line in the try-block with code like this
conn = url.openConnection(new Proxy(Proxy.Type.HTTP,
                                    new InetSocketAddress("<proxyHostName>", <proxyPort>)));
where proxyHostName and proxyPort will have to be set to the values that apply to you.
Let me know if this works. If it doesn't, do you get any error message?
Regards,
Jens