How to calculate a file size from URL in java

The accepted answer is prone to NullPointerException, doesn't work for files > 2GiB and contains an unnecessary call to getInputStream(). Here's the fixed code:

public long getFileSize(URL url) {
  HttpURLConnection conn = null;
  try {
    conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
    conn.setRequestMethod("HEAD");
    return conn.getContentLengthLong();
  } catch (IOException e) {
    throw new RuntimeException(e);
  } finally {
    if (conn != null) {
      conn.disconnect();
    }
  }
}

Update: The accepted answer got fixed.

Using a HEAD request, you can do something like this:

private static int getFileSize(URL url) {
    URLConnection conn = null;
    try {
        conn = url.openConnection();
        if(conn instanceof HttpURLConnection) {
            ((HttpURLConnection)conn).setRequestMethod("HEAD");
        }
        conn.getInputStream();
        return conn.getContentLength();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    } finally {
        if(conn instanceof HttpURLConnection) {
            ((HttpURLConnection)conn).disconnect();
        }
    }
}

Try to use HTTP HEAD method. It returns the HTTP headers only. The header Content-Length should contain information you need.

The HTTP response has a Content-Length header, so you could query the URLConnection object for this value.

Once the URL connection has been opened, you can try something like this:

List values = urlConnection.getHeaderFields().get("content-Length")
if (values != null && !values.isEmpty()) {

    // getHeaderFields() returns a Map with key=(String) header 
    // name, value = List of String values for that header field. 
    // just use the first value here.
    String sLength = (String) values.get(0);

    if (sLength != null) {
       //parse the length into an integer...
       ...
    }
}