How to read XML response from a URL in java?

Question

I need to write a simple function that takes a URL and processes the response which is XML or JSON, I have checked the Sun website https://swingx-ws.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList , but the HttpRequest object is to be found nowhere, is it possible to do this in Java? I`m writting a rich client end app.

Answer 1

I found that the above answer caused me an exception when I tried to instantiate the parser. I found the following code that resolved this at http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/xml/sax2/ch03_02.htm.

import org.xml.sax.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.*;

XMLReader        parser;

try {
    SAXParserFactory factory;

    factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance ();
    factory.setNamespaceAware (true);
    parser = factory.newSAXParser ().getXMLReader ();
    // success!

} catch (FactoryConfigurationError err) {
    System.err.println ("can't create JAXP SAXParserFactory, "
    + err.getMessage ());
} catch (ParserConfigurationException err) {
    System.err.println ("can't create XMLReader with namespaces, "
    + err.getMessage ());
} catch (SAXException err) {
    System.err.println ("Hmm, SAXException, " + err.getMessage ());
}