Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition [Electronic resources]

This class represents a uniform resource locator and allows the data referred to by the URL to be downloaded. A URL can be specified as a single string or with separate protocol, host, port, and file specifications. Relative URLs can also be specified with a String and the URL object to which it is relative. getFile( ) , getHost( ), getProtocol( ) and related methods return the various portions of the URL specified by a URL object. sameFile( ) determines whether a URL object refers to the same file as this one. getdefaultPort( ) returns the default port number for the protocol of the URL object; it may differ from the number returned by getPort( ) . Use openConnection( ) to obtain a URLConnection object with which you can download the content of the URL. In Java 5.0, you can explicitly specify a Proxy object through which the connection should be opened. For simple cases, however, the URL class defines shortcut methods that create and invoke methods on a URLConnection internally. getContent( ) downloads the URL data and parses it into an appropriate Java object (such as a string or image) if an appropriate ContentHandler can be found. In Java 1.3 and later, you can pass an array of Class objects that specify the type of objects that you are willing to accept as the return value of this method. If you wish to parse the URL content yourself, call openStream( ) to obtain an InputStream from which you can read the data.

public final class

URL implements Serializable { // Public Constructors public

URL (String

spec ) throws MalformedURLException; public

URL (URL

context , String

spec ) throws MalformedURLException;

1.2 public

URL (URL

context , String

spec , URLStreamHandler

handler ) throws MalformedURLException; public

URL (String

protocol , String

host , String

file ) throws MalformedURLException; public

URL (String

protocol , String

host , int

port , String

file ) throws MalformedURLException;

1.2 public

URL (String

protocol , String

host , int

port , String

file , URLStreamHandler

handler ) throws MalformedURLException; // Public Class Methods public static void

setURLStreamHandlerFactory (URLStreamHandlerFactory

fac ); // Public Instance Methods

1.3 public String

getAuthority ( ); public final Object

getContent ( ) throws java.io.IOException;

1.3 public final Object

getContent (Class[ ]

classes ) throws java.io.IOException;

1.4 public int

getDefaultPort ( ); public String

getFile ( ); public String

getHost ( );

1.3 public String

getPath ( ); public int

getPort ( ); public String

getProtocol ( );

1.3 public String

getQuery ( ); public String

getRef ( );

1.3 public String

getUserInfo ( ); public URLConnection

openConnection ( ) throws java.io.IOException;

5.0 public URLConnection

openConnection (java.net.Proxy

proxy ) throws java.io.IOException; public final java.io.InputStream

openStream ( ) throws java.io.IOException; public boolean

sameFile (URL

other ); public String

toExternalForm ( );

5.0 public URI

toURI ( ) throws URISyntaxException; // Public Methods Overriding Object public boolean

equals (Object

obj ); public int

hashCode ( ); synchronized public String

toString ( ); // Protected Instance Methods protected void

set (String

protocol , String

host , int

port , String

file , String

ref );

1.3 protected void

set (String

protocol , String

host , int

port , String

authority , String

userInfo , String

path , String

query , String

ref ); }

Passed To

Too many methods to list.

Returned By

java.io.File.toURL( ), Class.getResource( ), ClassLoader.{findResource( ), getresource( ), getSystemResource( )}, Authenticator.getRequestingURL( ), JarURLConnection.getJarFileURL( ), URI.toURL( ), URLClassLoader.{findResource( ), getURLs( )}, URLConnection.getURL( ), java.security.CodeSource.getLocation( )

Type Of

URLConnection.url