How to set user agent in: new XmlSlurper().parse(URL)

Question

I am launching requests to a web service using Groovy/XmlSlurper:

new XmlSlurper().parse("http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=...")

I would like to set the user agent to let the website know what project the requests are from.

How to set the user agent?

• XMLSlurper's constructors do not have anything like this.
• The setProperty method sounds interesting but Google does not lead to anything related to UA.
• I would rather avoid changing the code to abandon XmlSlurper in favor of another library.

Answer 1

Looks like Groovy uses the JVM's default SAX parser to connect to the input stream and perform the initial parsing. I saw this answer on SO that might help - all you need to do is set this before your call to the slurper to make it happen:

System.setProperty("http.agent", "my-agent-name");

P.S. This is just a guess - hope it helps.

Answer 2

I see p.3, btw there is also Groovy Http Builder, it uses JsonSlurper for JSON results, but it's much more flexible for making http requests - http://groovy.codehaus.org/HTTP+Builder