Two different methods for downloading a file using URL...

Question

I was just wondering if someone could shed some light on whether I should be downloading files using java.net.URL or java.net.URLConnection
Here are two ways that I have found to work (and yes I realize that one is outputting to a stream and the other is getting put into a StringBuffer):
      InputStream in = url.openStream();
      byte[] b = new byte[buffSize];
      fileOutStream = new FileOutputStream(fileToBeCreated);
      while ((bytesRead = in.read(b)) != -1){
        totalFileSize+=bytesRead;
        fileOutStream.write(b, 0, bytesRead);
      }and
      URLConnection _con = url.openConnection();
      in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(_con.getInputStream()));
      String inputLine;
      while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null){
          webPageStringBuff.append(inputLine+"\r\n");
      }In both of the above cases url is just a URL object that has already been instantiated with a valid URL.
So, just to re-iterate, I realize that the output portion of this code is doing something different (i.e. writing to a stream as opposed to appending to a StringBuffer) but I would like to know whether there is any reason to choose using the URLConnection to get the stream as opposed to using the URL to get the stream.
Thanks,
Tim

Answer 1

hi,
try out the following code
// Program: copyURL.java
// Author: Anil Hemrajani ([email protected])
// Purpose: Utility for copying files from the Internet to local disk
// Example: 1. java copyURL http://www.patriot.net/users/anil/resume/resume.gif
// 2. java copyURL http://www.ibm.com/index.html abcd.html
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
class copyURL
public static void main(String args[])
if (args.length < 1)
System.err.println
("usage: java copyURL URL [LocalFile]");
System.exit(1);
try
URL url = new URL(args[0]);
System.out.println("Opening connection to " + args[0] + "...");
URLConnection urlC = url.openConnection();
// Copy resource to local file, use remote file
// if no local file name specified
InputStream is = url.openStream();
// Print info about resource
System.out.print("Copying resource (type: " +
urlC.getContentType());
Date date=new Date(urlC.getLastModified());
System.out.println(", modified on: " +
date.toLocaleString() + ")...");
System.out.flush();
FileOutputStream fos=null;
if (args.length < 2)
String localFile=null;
// Get only file name
StringTokenizer st=new StringTokenizer(url.getFile(), "/");
while (st.hasMoreTokens())
localFile=st.nextToken();
fos = new FileOutputStream(localFile);
else
fos = new FileOutputStream(args[1]);
int oneChar, count=0;
while ((oneChar=is.read()) != -1)
fos.write(oneChar);
count++;
is.close();
fos.close();
System.out.println(count + " byte(s) copied");
catch (MalformedURLException e)
{ System.err.println(e.toString()); }
catch (IOException e)
{ System.err.println(e.toString()); }
ok