Java HttpURLConnection.getInputStream but get 401 IOException
http-status-code-401, httpresponse, httpurlconnection, java
Solution
See this question:
"The HttpURLConnection.getErrorStream method will return an InputStream which can be used to retrieve data from error conditions (such as a 404), according to the javadocs."
Problem
I am writing a REST client for CouchDB in Java. The following code should be quite standard: ``` this.httpCnt.connect(); Map<String, String> responseHeaders = new HashMap<>(); int i = 1; while (true){ String headerKey = this.httpCnt.getHeaderFieldKey(i); if (headerKey == null) break; responseHeaders.put(headerKey, this.httpCnt.getHeaderField(i)); i++; } InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(this.httpCnt.getInputStream()); StringBuilder responseBuilder = new StringBuilder(); char[] buffer = new char[1024]; while(true){ int noCharRead = reader.read(buffer); if (noCharRead == -1){ reader.close(); break; } responseBuilder.append(buffer, 0, noCharRead); } ``` I want to test what happen if the authentication fails. However if the authentication fails, when calling `getInputStream` of the HttpURLConnection, I get directly an IOException saying the server responses 401. I suppose if the server responses something, no matter success or failure, it should be able to read whatever the server returns. And I am sure in this case the server does return some text in the body, since if I do a `GET` to the server using curl and the authentication fails, I get a JSON object as the response body with some error messages in it. Is there any way to still get the response body even if 401?