How to make an HTTP request in Java and ignore the body

Question

To be more specific, I mean specifically to just consume the HTTP headers over the network and stop the communication before the client receives the response body.

Example

Client makes a request

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/UNAVAILABLE (Java/1.8.0_262)
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Then the response over the network is just

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 22:41:21 GMT
Server: Apache
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=10800
Content-Language: en
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Age: 1865
grace: none
Content-Length: 9213
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Ranges: bytes

Answer 1

Http protocol has six method, one of the methods is 'HEAD'. You can try use HEAD method instead of GET method.

And another stupid way : declare a web interface, and return null string.Like this:

// a web interface
String result = "";
return result;