Force retry on specific http status code

Question

Dealing with a specific website, sometimes I receive a http response with status code 403. I wanted to re-execute the request in such cases (because, in my specific situation, t

Answer 1

You can do it by manually checking the status code, something like this:

CloseableHttpResponse response = null;
boolean success = false;
while(!success) {
    response = client.execute(httpGet);
    int status = response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
    success = (status == 200);
    if (!success) {
        if(status == 403) {
            Thread.sleep(2000); // wait 2 seconds before retrying
        } else {
            throw new RuntimeException("Something went wrong: HTTP status: " + status);
        }
    }
}
String contents = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
response.close();

// ....

System.out.println(contents);

You would need to add some things like retrying a predefined number of times before throwing a final exception and catching some checked exceptions (like the InterruptedException thrown by Thread.sleep()), but basically the code shows the main idea.