Making use of the Internet connectivity on the Android platform often means having to access web pages and reading the data from it for your application. To achieve this, I wrote a function that takes in any URL to fetch the HTML contents from. What this function will give you is the HTML source code for a website. It will then be up to your app to parse the data properly to retrieve the information you need. I used regular expression matching to strip out the unnecessary bits and get right down to the content I wanted to display.

Here is a simple function that I use below. It did end up a bit slow accessing the URLs I sent it, so I eventually put the HTML processing on my own web server and then had my Android application simply fetch the data from there. You may get a dialog pop up in your app when using this if the access takes too long. It’s fine usually on wi-fi, but 3G can be a bit slow sometimes. As with any code, test before you deploy to see if it suits your needs. At the very least, you have a basis to use for tweaking in case you want to build in some slow response handling.

public String getURLContent(String url)
{
    try {
        DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(url);            
        ResponseHandler<String> resHandler = new BasicResponseHandler();
        String page = httpClient.execute(httpGet, resHandler);
        return page;
    } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
        return "";
    }  catch (IOException e) {
        return "";
    }
}