The abstract class ContentHandler is the superclass of all classes that read an Object from a URLConnection.

An application does not generally call the getContent method in this class directly. Instead, an application calls the getContent method in class URL or in URLConnection. The application's content handler factory (an instance of a class that implements the interface ContentHandlerFactory set up by a call to setContentHandlerFactory) is called with a String giving the MIME type of the object being received on the socket. The factory returns an instance of a subclass of ContentHandler, and its getContent method is called to create the object.

If no content handler could be found, URLConnection will look for a content handler in a user-definable set of places. Users can define a vertical-bar delimited set of class prefixes to search through by defining the java.content.handler.pkgs system property. The class name must be of the form:

{package-prefix}.{major}.{minor}

where {major}.{minor} is formed by taking the content-type string, replacing all slash characters with a period ('.'), and all other non-alphanumeric characters with the underscore character '_'. The alphanumeric characters are specifically the 26 uppercase ASCII letters 'A' through 'Z', the 26 lowercase ASCII letters 'a' through 'z', and the 10 ASCII digits '0' through '9'.

e.g. YoyoDyne.experimental.text.plain

If no user-defined content handler is found, then the system tries to load a specific content-type handler from one of the built-in handlers, if one exists.