How do I get HTTP response body as a string?

This example show you how to get HTTP response body as a string when using the Apache HttpComponents library. To get the response body as a string we can use the EntityUtils.toString() method. This method read the content of an HttpEntity object content and return it as a string. The content will be converted using the character set from the entity object.

Let’s see the code snippet below:

package org.kodejava.apache.http;

import org.apache.http.HttpEntity;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpGet;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.CloseableHttpClient;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.HttpClientBuilder;
import org.apache.http.util.EntityUtils;

import java.io.IOException;

public class EntityAsString {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (CloseableHttpClient client = HttpClientBuilder.create().build()) {
            HttpGet request = new HttpGet("https://kodejava.org");

            HttpResponse response = client.execute(request);
            HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();

            // Read the contents of an entity and return it as a String.
            String content = EntityUtils.toString(entity);
            System.out.println(content);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
    <artifactId>httpclient</artifactId>
    <version>4.5.14</version>
</dependency>

Maven Central