URL Help Needed

Question

Hello,
I have a method that needs to return a URLConnection object. I am passing into that method a string URL. I have created a URL Object from the url string, then I made a URLConnection object from that url object. Then I try to connect to that urlconnection object. But if I put in a bad URL, it does not throw an exception?
The purpose of this is that I have some xml files in a remote directory, and I am making sure that they exist before I throw them to a sax parser.
What can I do to make sure the files exist, keeping in mind that they live on a different server, and I didnt want to run rpc for this mission? PS, I got a DataInputStream on the connection, then read a line to throw an error, but then it messed up the returned connection.
Any ideas.....
CODE THAT DOES NOT THROW ERROR EVEN IF surl DOES NOT EXIST
eg
http://somehost.com/nonexistant.xml
public URLConnection getURLConnectionObject(String surl)
URLConnection c = null;
try
     URL url = new URL(surl);
String line;
     c = url.openConnection();
catch(MalformedURLException me) {
message = "MalformedURLException: " + me + "\n\n";
System.out.println("MalformedURLException: " + me);
catch (IOException ioe) {
message = "IOException: " + ioe + "\n\n";
System.out.println("IOException: " + ioe);
return c;

Answer 1

URL url = new URL(surl);
url.getContent // will throw an exception if you cannot get content..
//then return the connection
c = url.openConnection();