Simplest way to read JSON from a URL in Java

Question

This might be a dumb question but what is the simplest way to read and parse JSON from URL in Java?

In Groovy, it's a matter of few lines of code. Java examples that I find are ridiculously long (and have huge exception handling block).

All I want to do is to read the content of this link.

Answer 1

Using the Maven artifact org.json:json I got the following code, which I think is quite short. Not as short as possible, but still usable.

package so4308554;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.net.URL;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;

import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

public class JsonReader {

  private static String readAll(Reader rd) throws IOException {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    int cp;
    while ((cp = rd.read()) != -1) {
      sb.append((char) cp);
    }
    return sb.toString();
  }

  public static JSONObject readJsonFromUrl(String url) throws IOException, JSONException {
    InputStream is = new URL(url).openStream();
    try {
      BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
      String jsonText = readAll(rd);
      JSONObject json = new JSONObject(jsonText);
      return json;
    } finally {
      is.close();
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, JSONException {
    JSONObject json = readJsonFromUrl("https://graph.facebook.com/19292868552");
    System.out.println(json.toString());
    System.out.println(json.get("id"));
  }
}