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DONN FELKER

Lessons Learned From the Software Industry

Android: Odd Error in DefaultHttpClient

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I’m working on a couple of projects that interact with REST api’s and consume JSON data and in doing so I use the DefaultHttpClient from apache, located in the Android framework.

The Error

Last night I was working on a project and kept getting this error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Target host must not be null, or set in parameters.

I spent about 20 minutes banging my head against the wall, inspecting through the debugger, googling, etc. Long story short, there was not much info out there on how to fix this error. I found out what it was after another 20 minutes banging my head against the keyboard.

The Issue

I was connecting to website with the following URI:

www.example.org/api/json/get_stuff

The problem is that I was missing the “http://”. Therefore it should have been:

http://www.example.org/api/json/get_stuff

This fixed the issue. The reason is that the scheme was not provided in the URI. As soon as this was changed the entire client worked as expected.

Normally I wouldn’t blog this, but this is one of those issues where if I can’t find the resolution to the issue, I might as well blog it so others can find it when they run into it.

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Comments

  2. Rob says

    THANK you! Exactly what I hit, and since I was previously stung by HttpClient not wanting the http:// at the start of the URL, the last thing I would've tried was adding it back on for this. Thanks again for bothering to post 🙂

    Rob

  5. Rgreenwalt says

    I work on android for google and hit this issue too – absurd error message.. I'll file a bug report and hopefully this gets fixed (either a better error message or the underlying problem).

  11. Meka103 says

    THANKS!!
    That was *exactly* my issue. I just wasted about 30 minutes trying to figure this one out b4 finding this website.

  12. Raveesh Mca says

    08-18 10:43:07.293: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(209): Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Target host must not be null, or set in parameters.
    Im passing the URL as string as follows :

    new HttpGet(URLEncoder.encode(“http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p&chd=e:5mGa&chs=500×200&chts=000000,16&chtt=2D+Pie+Chart&chco=FFFF00,FF0000&chl=Ms.+Pac-Man|Red+Lips.png”));
    But getting the above error? Any idea how to fix it? Please help me. The url is working perfectly in Firefox browser. But getting error in device.

  14. Donn Felker says

    Raveesh – In the debugger, what is the URI that is output from the HttpGet? Looking at that may give you some insight. For example, are some of the characters being encoded that should not be?

  23. Teots says

    Thank you!

    I had the same problem and you prevented my head form being banged on the keyboard for several minutes 🙂

  35. Ravi says

     http://staging_api.visitorm.com/v1/63814fc0e12c012e2f7312313b036653/apps/4.json

    same error is here I found a reason “_” in my url I try diffrnt diffrnt encoding systm in android but not success any one can help me 
    java.lang.IllegalStateException:host must not be null.

  38. Shraddha says

    Getting the same exception sometimes. Url is not encoded and it contains the prefix “http://” for both get and post requests.

  39. Suparna Mukherjee says

    Using a wamp server. TRying to access a xml file from local host

    Url is 10.0.2.2/suparna/abc.xml

    but it’s not working. Can you help?

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