Using HttpURLConnection, InputStreamReader, I get null response

Question

I keep getting a "null" exception when I run this code. If I manually type the url string into my browser the php script posts "{query_result:SUCCESS}" indicating it worked, but when I try it via this code I just get the Exception e as "null". Can anyone help?

protected String signUp(String username) {
        String link = "http://12.34.56.78/JSON_addUser.php";
        String data = "";
        BufferedReader bufferedReader;
        String result = "";
        String message;

        try {
            data += "?username=" + URLEncoder.encode(username, "UTF-8");
            link += data;

            URL url = new URL(link);

            HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
            bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));
            result = bufferedReader.readLine();
            return result;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            message = "Exception trying:  " + link + "   Got: " + e.getMessage() + result;
            return message;
        }
    }

Answer 1

Pretty often servers block requests like this because they are automated without a "User Agent" header. You might want to behave like a "real" browser.

Also i see a content encoding issue here. The constructor from InputStreamReader uses the default encoding and this might not be the encoding from the server--it might crash from converting the bytes into chars.