Java Utililty Methods URL Connection

URL yahoo = new URL(url);
URLConnection yc = yahoo.openConnection();
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(yc.getInputStream(), "UTF-8"));
String inputLine;
StringBuilder a = new StringBuilder();
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {
    a.append(inputLine + "\n");
in.close();
return a.toString();

if (level > 5) {
    throw new IOException("Two many levels of redirection in URL");
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
Map hdrs = conn.getHeaderFields();
String[] keys = (String[]) hdrs.keySet().toArray(new String[0]);
for (String key : keys) {
    if (key != null && key.toLowerCase().equals("location")) {
...

String line;
try (final BufferedReader is = sendRequest(new URL(url))) {
    try (final StringWriter os = new StringWriter()) {
        while ((line = is.readLine()) != null) {
            os.append(line);
        return os.toString();
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
    throw new MalformedURLException("Invalid URL " + url);
} catch (IOException e) {
    throw new IOException("Error trying to write in the local buffer to store the page HTML from " + url,
            e);

ArrayList fileContents = new ArrayList();
URLConnection openConnection = url.openConnection();
openConnection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent",
        "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36");
BufferedReader fileReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(openConnection.getInputStream()));
String fileLine = "";
while ((fileLine = fileReader.readLine()) != null) {
    if (!fileLine.equals("")) {
...

List<String> ret = new ArrayList<String>();
try {
    String firstPart;
    if (urlString.substring(urlString.length() - 1).compareTo("/") == 0) {
        firstPart = urlString.substring(0, urlString.length() - 1);
    } else {
        firstPart = urlString;
    String secondPart;
    if (postPath.substring(0).compareTo("/") == 0) {
        secondPart = postPath.substring(1, postPath.length() - 1);
    } else {
        secondPart = postPath.substring(0, postPath.length() - 1);
    String completePath = firstPart + "/" + secondPart;
    URL url = new URL(completePath);
    String data = null;
    for (Entry<String, String> entry : keyValuePairs.entrySet()) {
        String key = entry.getKey();
        String value = entry.getValue();
        if (data == null) {
            data = URLEncoder.encode(key, "UTF-8") + "=" + URLEncoder.encode(value, "UTF-8");
        } else {
            data += "&" + URLEncoder.encode(key, "UTF-8") + "=" + URLEncoder.encode(value, "UTF-8");
    URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
    conn.setDoOutput(true);
    OutputStreamWriter wr = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
    wr.write(data);
    wr.flush();
    BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
    String line;
    while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null) {
        ret.add(line);
    wr.close();
    rd.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
    return null;
return ret;

if (url == null)
    return null;
try {
    URL u = new URL(url);
    URLConnection urlConnection = u.openConnection();
    urlConnection.setRequestProperty("user-agent",
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36");
    return urlConnection.getInputStream();
...

JarFile jarFile = conn.getJarFile();
String entryName = conn.getEntryName();
ZipEntry dirEntry = jarFile.getEntry(addEndingSlash(entryName));
return dirEntry != null && dirEntry.isDirectory();

try {
    final URLConnection connection = new URL(url).openConnection();
    connection.getInputStream().close();
    return true;
} catch (IOException ioe) {
    if (ioe instanceof MalformedURLException) {
        throw (MalformedURLException) ioe;
    return false;

try {
    final URLConnection connection = new URL(url).openConnection();
    connection.setConnectTimeout(CONNECT_TIMEOUT);
    connection.connect();
    return true;
} catch (final IOException e) {
    return false;

InputStream in = null;
try {
    URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
    setTimeout(connection, SOCKET_TIMEOUT);
    connection.connect();
    in = connection.getInputStream();
    if (in != null) {
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
...