Closing BufferedReader and InputStreamReader

Question

This piece of code is creating memory leak issues cause of BufferedReader and InputStreamReader which I think might be happening cause of some exceptions. How should I change it?

try{
    URL url = new URL(sMyUrl);
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
    while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
        jsonString += str;
    }
    in.close();
}catch(Exception e){

}

Answer 1

It would be safer to close your stream using a try..finally block. You might also use a StringBuilder as it is designed for concatenating strings. You should also avoid catching Exception and doing nothing with it. Also, your code is concatenating lines without any line-breaks. This may well not be what you want, in which case append("\\n") when you read each line in.

Here's a version with those modifications:

StringBuilder json = new StringBuilder();
try {
    URL url = new URL(sMyUrl);
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));
    try {
        String str;
        while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
            json.append(str).append("\n");
        }
    } finally {
        in.close();
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    throw new RuntimeException("Failed to read JSON from stream", e);
}

Answer 2

The code isn't pretty but won't be creating a memory leak. I suggest you use a memory profiler to determine where your memory is being used. Otherwise you are just guessing even if you have ten + years experience performance tuning in Java ;)

A better alternative is to use Java 7

URL url = new URL(sMyUrl);
try(BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()))) {
  while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
     jsonString.append(str).append("\n");
  }
}

If you have Java 6 or older you can use.

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()))) {
try {
  while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
     jsonString.append(str).append("\n");
  }
} finally {
  in.close();
}