how to read/fetch the XML file from an URL using Java?

Reading from a URL is know different than any other input source. There are several different Java tools for XML parsing.

You can use Xstream it supports this.

URL url = new URL("yoururl");
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                new InputStreamReader(
                url.openStream()));



xSteamObj.fromXML(in);//return parsed object

Two steps:

1. Get the bytes from the server.
2. Create a suitable XML source for it, perhaps even a Transformer.

Connect the two and get e.g. a DOM for further processing.

I use JDOM:

import org.jdom.Document;
import org.jdom.Element;
import org.jdom.input.*;

StringBuilder responseBuilder = new StringBuilder();
try {
 // Create a URLConnection object for a URL
 URL url = new URL( "http://127.0.0.1" );
 URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
 HttpURLConnection httpConn;

 httpConn = (HttpURLConnection)conn;
 BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(httpConn.getInputStream()));
 String line;

 while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null)
 {
  responseBuilder.append(line + '\n');
 }
}
catch(Exception e){
 System.out.println(e);
}

SAXBuilder sb = new SAXBuilder();
Document d = null;
try{
    d = sb.build( new StringReader( responseBuilder.toString() ) );
}catch(Exception e){
    System.out.println(e);
}

Of course, you can cut out the whole read URL to string, then put a string reader on the string, but Ive cut/pasted from two different areas. So this was easier.