Dealing with HTTP Headers in Java

gistfile1.java

package com.stackoverflow.q2307291;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.net.Socket;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String hostname = "stackoverflow.com";
        int port = 80;

        Socket socket = null;
        PrintWriter writer = null;
        BufferedReader reader = null;

        try {
            socket = new Socket(hostname, port);
            writer = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(socket.getOutputStream()));
            writer.println("GET / HTTP/1.1");
            writer.println("Host: " + hostname);
            writer.println("Accept: */*");
            writer.println("User-Agent: Java"); // Be honest.
            writer.println(""); // Important, else the server will expect that there's more into the request.
            writer.flush();

            reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));
            for (String line; (line = reader.readLine()) != null;) {
                if (line.isEmpty()) break; // Stop when headers are completed. We're not interested in all the HTML.
                System.out.println(line);
            }
        } finally {
            if (reader != null) try { reader.close(); } catch (IOException logOrIgnore) {} 
            if (writer != null) { writer.close(); }
            if (socket != null) try { socket.close(); } catch (IOException logOrIgnore) {} 
        }
    }

}