How to download and save a file from Internet using Java?

Question

There is an online file (such as http://www.example.com/information.asp) I need to grab and save to a directory. I know there are several methods for grabbing a

Answer 1

It's possible to download the file with with Apache's HttpComponents instead of Commons-IO. This code allows you to download a file in Java according to its URL and save it at the specific destination.

public static boolean saveFile(URL fileURL, String fileSavePath) {

    boolean isSucceed = true;

    CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClients.createDefault();

    HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(fileURL.toString());
    httpGet.addHeader("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0");
    httpGet.addHeader("Referer", "https://www.google.com");

    try {
        CloseableHttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpGet);
        HttpEntity fileEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();

        if (fileEntity != null) {
            FileUtils.copyInputStreamToFile(fileEntity.getContent(), new File(fileSavePath));
        }

    } catch (IOException e) {
        isSucceed = false;
    }

    httpGet.releaseConnection();

    return isSucceed;
}

In contrast to the single line of code:

FileUtils.copyURLToFile(fileURL, new File(fileSavePath),
                        URLS_FETCH_TIMEOUT, URLS_FETCH_TIMEOUT);

this code will give you more control over a process and let you specify not only time outs but User-Agent and Referer values, which are critical for many web-sites.