Java resource closing

Question

I\'m writing an app that connect to a website and read one line from it. I do it like this:

try{
        URLConnection connection = new URL(\"www.example.com         


        

Answer 1

Closing the BufferedReader is enough - this closes the underlying reader too.

Yishai posted a nice pattern for closing the streams (closing might throw another exception).

Answer 2

I'd use apache commons IO for this, as others have suggested, mainly IOUtils.toString(InputStream) and IOUtils.closeQuietly(InputStream):

public String readFromUrl(final String url) {

    InputStream stream = null; // keep this for finally block

    try {
        stream = new URL(url).openConnection().getInputStream();  // don't keep unused locals
        return IOUtils.toString(stream);
    } catch (final IOException e) {
        // handle IO errors here (probably not like this)
        throw new IllegalStateException("Can't read URL " + url, e);
    } finally {
        // close the stream here, if it's null, it will be ignored
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(stream);
    }

}