HttpURLConnection reading response content on 403

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Read error response body in Java 6 answers

When I fetch data from an URL with a 403 response

is = conn.getInputStream();

It throws an IOException and I can't get the response data.

But when I use firefox and access that url directly, The ResponseCode is still 403, but I can get the html content

Answer 1

Usage example of HttpURLConnection :

String response = null;
try {
    URL url = new URL("http://google.com/pagedoesnotexist");
    HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();

    // Hack to force HttpURLConnection to run the request
    // Otherwise getErrorStream always returns null
    connection.getResponseCode();
    InputStream stream = connection.getErrorStream();
    if (stream == null) {
        stream = connection.getInputStream();
    }
    // This is a try with resources, Java 7+ only
    // If you use Java 6 or less, use a finally block instead
    try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(stream)) {
        scanner.useDelimiter("\\Z");
        response = scanner.next();
    }
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
    // Replace this with your exception handling
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // Replace this with your exception handling
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 2

The HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream method will return an InputStream which can be used to retrieve data from error conditions (such as a 404), according to the javadocs.

Answer 3

try this:

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getResponseCode() / 100 == 2 ? con.getInputStream() : con.getErrorStream()));

source https://stackoverflow.com/a/30712213/505623

Answer 4

try something like this:

try {
    String text = "url";
    URL url = new URL(text);
    URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
    // fake request coming from browser
    conn.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB;     rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
    String f = in.readLine();
    in.close();
    System.out.println(f);
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 5

I got the same error even after adding agent string. Finally after a days investigation figured out the issue. It is really weired if the url scheme start with "HTTPS" it results in error 403. It should be in lowercase ("https"). So make sure you call "url.toLowercase()" before opening the connection