Accessing a page requiring authentication

Question

Hello,
I am working on a project to get some information from a web page.
I am using the following piece of code to access and get the info from the page:
URL url = new URL(<PAGE ADDRESS>);
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader
(conn.getInputStream()));
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
in.close();
This code was working fine.
However, now I have to access a page that requires authentication. And when I use the code above the error code 401 is returned.
Somebody knows how I can access a page that requires authentication?
How can I pass the needed user name and password to connect to the page?
Thanks,
Leandro

Answer 1

Basically you set an HTTP header with the authentication credentials, which as I recall are encoded but not encrypted. IIRC the header is "Authorization". IIRC you set the header with java.net.URLConnection.addRequestProperty or .setRequestProperty.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2616.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2617.html