Is there a way to get the String value of an HttpEntity when EntityUtils.toString() returns an exception?

Question

I keep running into this situation where I get back a bad HTTP response (like a 400) but cannot look at the HttpEntity in the HttpResponse object. When I step through with the debugger, I can see that the entity has content (length > 0) and I can even look at the content, but all I see is an array of numbers (ASCII codes I guess?) which isn't helpful. I'll call EntityUtils.toString() on the entity, but I get back an exception -- either an IOException, or some kind of "object is in an invalid state" exception. This is really frustrating! Is there any way to get at this content in a human-readable form?

Here is my code :

    protected JSONObject makeRequest(HttpRequestBase request) throws ClientProtocolException, IOException, JSONException, WebRequestBadStatusException {

    HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

    try {
        request.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");
        request.addHeader("Authorization", "OAuth " + accessToken);
        request.addHeader("X-PrettyPrint", "1");

        HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(request);
        int statusCode = response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();

        if (statusCode < 200 || statusCode >= 300) {
            throw new WebRequestBadStatusException(statusCode);
        }

        HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();

        if (entity != null) {
            return new JSONObject(EntityUtils.toString(entity));
        } else {
            return null;
        }

    } finally {
        httpclient.getConnectionManager().shutdown();
    }
}

See where I throw the exception? What I'd like to do is suck out the content of the HttpEntity and put it in the exception.

Answer 1

Appache has already provided a Util class for that called EntityUtils.

String responseXml = EntityUtils.toString(httpResponse.getEntity());
EntityUtils.consume(httpResponse.getEntity());