The code snippet below use the FileUtils.toFile(URL) method that can be found in the commons-io library to convert a URL into a File. The url protocol should be file or else null will be returned.

package org.kodejava.example.commons.io;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

import java.io.File;
import java.net.URL;

public class URLToFileObject {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // FileUtils.toFile(URL url) convert from URL the File.
        String data = FileUtils.readFileToString(FileUtils.toFile(
                URLToFileObject.class.getResource("/data.txt")), "UTF-8");
        System.out.println("data = " + data);

        // Creates a URL with file protocol and convert it into File object.
        File file = FileUtils.toFile(new URL("file://D:/demo.txt"));
        data = FileUtils.readFileToString(file, "UTF-8");
        System.out.println("data = " + data);
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<!-- http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/commons-io/commons-io/2.6/commons-io-2.6.jar -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
    <version>2.6</version>
</dependency>