The JavaTM Tutorial

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Trail: Custom Networking
Lesson: Working with URLs

## Connecting to a URL

> After you've successfully created a `URL` object, you can call the `URL` object's `openConnection` method to connect to it. When you connect to a `URL`, you are initializing a communication link between your Java program and the URL over the network. For example, you can open a connection to the Yahoo site with the following code:

> >     try {
> >         URL yahoo = new URL("http://www.yahoo.com/");
> >         URLConnection yahooConnection = yahoo.openConnection();

> >     } catch (MalformedURLException e) {     // new URL() failed
> >         . . .
> >     } catch (IOException e) {               // openConnection() failed
> >         . . .
> >     }

> If possible, the `openConnection` method creates a new `URLConnection` (if an appropriate one does not already exist), initializes it, connects to the URL, and returns the `URLConnection` object. If something goes wrong--for example, the Yahoo server is down--then the `openConnection` method throws an IOException.

> Now that you've successfully connected to your URL, you can use the `URLConnection` object to perform actions such as reading from or writing to the connection. The next section shows you how.

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