Can Document Builder parse an XML file from a URL?

Question

Warning: Java newbie here...
My problem is that I am able to parse an XML file if it is copied into my project, but not if it is a full URL. Here is what I got so far, that works.
import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
try {
    File file = new File("path/to/file.xml");
    DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = db.parse(file);
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
    NodeList nodeLst = doc.getElementsByTagName("Names");
    for (int s = 0; s < nodeLst.getLength(); s++) {
        Node parentNode = nodeLst.item(s);
        if (parentNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
            Element parentElmnt = (Element) parentNode;
            NodeList nameElmntLst = parentElmnt.getElementsByTagName("Name");
            //etc.
} catch (Exception e){
    e.printStackTrace();
}So building off of this I have tried to parse an input stream like this:
URL url = new URL("http://example.com/file.xml");
InputStream is = url.getInputStream();
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(is);which gives me the following error
[Fatal Error] :-1:-1: Premature end of file.
LOG: HME receiver connected
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Premature end of file.
I also even tried to write the file locally like this:
URL url = new URL("http://example.com/file.xml");
HttpURLConnection urlcon = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
urlcon.connect();
InputStream is = urlcon.getInputStream();
File file = new File("path/to/file.xml");
OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
byte buf[] = new byte[1024];
int len;
while((len=is.read(buf))>0)
    out.write(buf,0,len);
out.close();
is.close();
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(file);This gives the same error.
If anyone can point me in the right direction I would forever thankful. I've tried search Google and the Sun forums, but haven't quite found the solution. I think it is because I need to try something else completely. Thank you for reading.
~~~~ Jeremy

Answer 1

jmose wrote:
If I copy the page, it works as shown in the first code block. In the third codeblock the file is never even created, so I cannot tell if that works or not.So: having the parser access the URL fails, and having some other Java code access the URL also fails in the identical way? That suggests the problem is simply accessing the URL via Java code. Presumably when you downloaded the data from the URL, you used a browser to do it and not wget or something like that?