Why Is Inputstreamreader Returning Different Content Than Browser?

If you enter this in a browser url: https://charlotte.realforeclose.com/index.cfm?zaction=AUCTION&Zmethod=UPDATE&FNC=LOAD&AREA=W&PageDir=0&doR=1&AUCTIONDAT

Solution 1:

Actually, I opened your URL in the browser and got

{"retHTML":"", "rlist":""}

Then I wrote my own code similar to yours and got the same String in response. So for me browser and Java code fetched the same info. But It is easily explainable how it doesn't have to be the case. Server can check and detect whether or not client that sends request is a browser and what kind and from which location request was sent. Based on those details server can send back customized response.

Solution 2:

Try running this – it will fetch that url and display the output:

curl "https://charlotte.realforeclose.com/index.cfm?zaction=AUCTION&Zmethod=UPDATE&FNC=LOAD&AREA=W&PageDir=0&doR=1&AUCTIONDATE=07/16/2019"

So the behavior you're seeing isn't something Java is (or isn't) doing.

I suspect that the remote server is looking at the inbound HTTP request and deciding what to return. In your Java code, as with this simple curl example, there are no browser headers, user agent, etc. so the server is probably giving a generic answer because of that.

As another test, you could try changing your Java code to something else:

StringurlStr="http://duckduckgo.com";