How can I get an HTTP response body as a string?

Here are two examples from my working project.

  1. Using EntityUtils and HttpEntity

    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(new HttpGet(URL));
    HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
    String responseString = EntityUtils.toString(entity, "UTF-8");
    System.out.println(responseString);
    
  2. Using BasicResponseHandler

    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(new HttpGet(URL));
    String responseString = new BasicResponseHandler().handleResponse(response);
    System.out.println(responseString);
    

Every library I can think of returns a stream. You could use IOUtils.toString() from Apache Commons IO to read an InputStream into a String in one method call. E.g.:

URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/");
URLConnection con = url.openConnection();
InputStream in = con.getInputStream();
String encoding = con.getContentEncoding();
encoding = encoding == null ? "UTF-8" : encoding;
String body = IOUtils.toString(in, encoding);
System.out.println(body);

Update: I changed the example above to use the content encoding from the response if available. Otherwise it'll default to UTF-8 as a best guess, instead of using the local system default.