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

Use apache commons-io, just one line code:

FileUtils.copyURLToFile(URL, File)

Answer 2

When using Java 7+ use the following method to download a file from the Internet and save it to some directory:

private static Path download(String sourceURL, String targetDirectory) throws IOException
{
    URL url = new URL(sourceURL);
    String fileName = sourceURL.substring(sourceURL.lastIndexOf('/') + 1, sourceURL.length());
    Path targetPath = new File(targetDirectory + File.separator + fileName).toPath();
    Files.copy(url.openStream(), targetPath, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);

    return targetPath;
}

Documentation here.

Answer 3

There is method U.fetch(url) in underscore-java library.

pom.xml:

  <groupId>com.github.javadev</groupId>
  <artifactId>underscore</artifactId>
  <version>1.45</version>

Code example:

import com.github.underscore.lodash.U;

public class Download {
    public static void main(String ... args) {
        String text = U.fetch("https://stackoverflow.com/questions"
        + "/921262/how-to-download-and-save-a-file-from-internet-using-java").text();
    }
}

Answer 4

Simpler nio usage:

URL website = new URL("http://www.website.com/information.asp");
try (InputStream in = website.openStream()) {
    Files.copy(in, target, StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);
}

Answer 5

There are many elegant and efficient answers here. But the conciseness can make us lose some useful information. In particular, one often does not want to consider a connection error an Exception, and one might want to treat differently some kind of network-related errors - for example, to decide if we should retry the download.

Here's a method that does not throw Exceptions for network errors (only for truly exceptional problems, as malformed url or problems writing to the file)

/**
 * Downloads from a (http/https) URL and saves to a file. 
 * Does not consider a connection error an Exception. Instead it returns:
 *  
 *    0=ok  
 *    1=connection interrupted, timeout (but something was read)
 *    2=not found (FileNotFoundException) (404) 
 *    3=server error (500...) 
 *    4=could not connect: connection timeout (no internet?) java.net.SocketTimeoutException
 *    5=could not connect: (server down?) java.net.ConnectException
 *    6=could not resolve host (bad host, or no internet - no dns)
 * 
 * @param file File to write. Parent directory will be created if necessary
 * @param url  http/https url to connect
 * @param secsConnectTimeout Seconds to wait for connection establishment
 * @param secsReadTimeout Read timeout in seconds - trasmission will abort if it freezes more than this 
 * @return See above
 * @throws IOException Only if URL is malformed or if could not create the file
 */
public static int saveUrl(final Path file, final URL url, 
  int secsConnectTimeout, int secsReadTimeout) throws IOException {
    Files.createDirectories(file.getParent()); // make sure parent dir exists , this can throw exception
    URLConnection conn = url.openConnection(); // can throw exception if bad url
    if( secsConnectTimeout > 0 ) conn.setConnectTimeout(secsConnectTimeout * 1000);
    if( secsReadTimeout > 0 ) conn.setReadTimeout(secsReadTimeout * 1000);
    int ret = 0;
    boolean somethingRead = false;
    try (InputStream is = conn.getInputStream()) {
        try (BufferedInputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(is); OutputStream fout = Files
                .newOutputStream(file)) {
            final byte data[] = new byte[8192];
            int count;
            while((count = in.read(data)) > 0) {
                somethingRead = true;
                fout.write(data, 0, count);
            }
        }
    } catch(java.io.IOException e) { 
        int httpcode = 999;
        try {
            httpcode = ((HttpURLConnection) conn).getResponseCode();
        } catch(Exception ee) {}
        if( somethingRead && e instanceof java.net.SocketTimeoutException ) ret = 1;
        else if( e instanceof FileNotFoundException && httpcode >= 400 && httpcode < 500 ) ret = 2; 
        else if( httpcode >= 400 && httpcode < 600 ) ret = 3; 
        else if( e instanceof java.net.SocketTimeoutException ) ret = 4; 
        else if( e instanceof java.net.ConnectException ) ret = 5; 
        else if( e instanceof java.net.UnknownHostException ) ret = 6;  
        else throw e;
    }
    return ret;
}

Answer 6

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.