Google Webservice Problem

Hi, I am new to the forums here and was hoping someone could help me out. I have been working on this project and have been stuck for quite a while now(almost a week). I am learning about how to connect java to the web and would like to do the example of connecting to a google webservice. (specifically the geocoding webservice) I have created a valid URL I know because it works in the browser, but I just get a thrown exception (http 400---bad request) when I try to call upon the URL from my java code.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm truly stumped!

Jim

Code java:

private void searchGoogle(String street, String city, String state)
    {
        URL url = null;
        URLConnection connection = null;
        InputSource inputxml = null;
        NodeList nodes = null;
        Permission per= null;
 
        //run a search on google server and display results in list
        XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
        XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();
 
 
 
        //replace all spaces in search strings with "+"
        street.replace(' ', '+');
        city.replace(' ', '+');
        state.replace(' ', '+');
 
        String request = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/xml?address=";
        request = request.concat(street);
        request = request.concat(",+");
        request = request.concat(city);
        request = request.concat(",+");
        request = request.concat(state);
        request = request.concat("&sensor=false");
 
        try
        {
 
            url = new URL(request);
 
            connection = url.openConnection();
 
            inputxml = new InputSource(connection.getInputStream());
            nodes = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate("XPATH_EXPRESSION", inputxml, XPathConstants.NODESET);
        }
        catch(Exception MalformedURLException){
            System.out.print("connection error");
        }
 
 
 
 
        // We can then iterate over the NodeList and extract the content via getTextContent().
      // NOTE: this will only return text for element nodes at the returned context.
      for (int i = 0, n = nodes.getLength(); i < n; i++) {
        String nodeString = nodes.item(i).getTextContent();
        System.out.print(nodeString);
        System.out.print("\n");
        }
 
    }