URGENT: Need help reading URL of current page

Question

Hello kind people!
I need help, and its very simple:
How do i read the URL of a web page?
For example, the URL of this page is:
http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5327796
So how can i be able to read in this URL in my java program?
thanks SO MUCH
P.S. I HAVE searched the java docs and everything, the closest thing i found was request.getRequestURL().? but i have no idea how to use it. you have NO IDEA how appreciative i would be if you could simply show me exactly how to read in the URL of a given page.
thanks SO MUCH
Edited by: homegrownpeas on Aug 31, 2008 5:19 PM

Answer 1

Going by what I understand here is a simple version of how you can read data from over HTTP.
This expects the "page" to be text (hence an InputStreamReader instead of an InputStream.)
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.util.HashMap;
* GPLv2.
* @author karlm816
public class HomeGrownPeas {
      * @param args
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          HashMap<String, String> params = new HashMap<String, String>();
          params.put("threadID", "5327796");
          System.out.println(loadHttpPage("http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa", params));     
     public static String loadHttpPage(String sUrl, HashMap<String, String> params) {
          // Build the HTTP request string
          StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
          if (params != null) {
               for (String key : params.keySet()) {
                    if (sb.length() > 0) {
                         sb.append("&");
                    sb.append(key);
                    sb.append("=");
                    sb.append(params.get(key));
          System.out.println("params: " + sb.toString());
          try {
               URL url = new URL(sUrl);
               URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
               connection.setDoOutput(true);
               connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Length", "" + sb.length());
               connection.setUseCaches(false);
               if (connection instanceof HttpURLConnection) {
                    HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) connection;
                    conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
               OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream());
               osw.write(sb.toString());
               osw.close();
               // Now use sb to hold the resutls from the request
               sb = new StringBuilder();
               BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                     new InputStreamReader(
                     connection.getInputStream()));
               String s;
               while ((s = in.readLine()) != null) {
                    sb.append(s);
                    // To make it more "human readable"
                    sb.append("\n");
               in.close();
         } catch (IOException e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
              return null;
        return sb.toString();
}