How can I get an HTTP response body as a string?

I know there used to be a way to get it with Apache Commons as documented here:

http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-legacy/apidocs/org/apache/commons/httpclient/HttpMethod.html

...and an example here:

http://www.kodejava.org/examples/416.html

...but I believe this is deprecated.

Is there any other way to make an http get request in Java and get the response body as a string and not a stream?

Here are two examples from my working project.

1. Using EntityUtils and HttpEntity

   HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(new HttpGet(URL));
   HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
   String responseString = EntityUtils.toString(entity, "UTF-8");
   System.out.println(responseString);
   

2. Using BasicResponseHandler

   HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(new HttpGet(URL));
   String responseString = new BasicResponseHandler().handleResponse(response);
   System.out.println(responseString);
   

Every library I can think of returns a stream. You could use IOUtils.toString() from Apache Commons IO to read an InputStream into a String in one method call. E.g.:

URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/");
URLConnection con = url.openConnection();
InputStream in = con.getInputStream();
String encoding = con.getContentEncoding();
encoding = encoding == null ? "UTF-8" : encoding;
String body = IOUtils.toString(in, encoding);
System.out.println(body);

Update: I changed the example above to use the content encoding from the response if available. Otherwise it'll default to UTF-8 as a best guess, instead of using the local system default.

Here's an example from another simple project I was working on using the httpclient library from Apache:

String response = new String();
List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(1);
nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("j", request));
HttpEntity requestEntity = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs);

HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(mURI);
httpPost.setEntity(requestEntity);
HttpResponse httpResponse = mHttpClient.execute(httpPost);
HttpEntity responseEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();
if(responseEntity!=null) {
    response = EntityUtils.toString(responseEntity);
}

just use EntityUtils to grab the response body as a String. very simple.