java.io.IOException: Server returns HTTP response code 505

Question

I have HTML based queries in my code and one specific kind seems to give rise to IOExceptions upon receiving 505 response from the server. I have looked up the 505 response along with other people who seemed to have similar problems. Apparently 505 stands for HTTP version mismatch, but when I copy the same query URL to any browser (tried firefox, seamonkey and Opera) there seems to be no problem. One of the posts I read suggested that the browsers might automatically handle the version mismatch problem..

I have tried to dig in deeper by using the nice developer tool that comes with Opera, and it looks like there is no mismatch in versions (I believe Java uses HTTP 1.1) and a nice 200 OK response is received. Why do I experience problems when the same query goes through my Java code?

     private InputStream openURL(String urlName) throws IOException{    
    URL url = new URL(urlName);
    URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
    return urlConnection.getInputStream();
 }

sample link: http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/?query=mnemonic%3aNUGM_HUMAN&format=tab&columns=id,entry%20name,reviewed,organism,length

Answer 1

There has been some issues in Tomcat with URLs containing space in it. To fix the problem, you need to encode your url with URLEncoder.

Example (notice the space):

String url="http://example.org/test test2/index.html";
String encodedURL=java.net.URLEncoder.encode(url,"UTF-8");
System.out.println(encodedURL); //outputs http%3A%2F%2Fexample.org%2Ftest+test2%2Findex.html