Topic: Web scraping in Java or C++

Now that i'm a full-blown Linux user, all my old VB6 code has become semi-obsolete. Not that it's a major problem, because after several years of botting against betfair, i have finally accepted defeat (sort of). On the plus side, moving to Linux has given me that extra push to learn C/C++ and Java, something i've been meaning to do for a couple of years but never bothered with because coding whatever i wanted in VB6 was always the easy option.

I've done a little Java and understand the concept of classes and the whole OO thing, however i've not previously had a specific project to keep me interested. To cut a long story short, i need to do some web scraping in order to gather some info from several websites. I'd like to use some "native" Java functions and i'm not keen on using any 3rd party libraries because Java is already very bloaty. What i'm asking for is some advice and/or source code on the most simple and efficient way to:

1. download the HTML source from a given URL.
2. parse the HTML. In VB6, i wrote a simple function like this: GetSubstring(tag1, tag2) which returned the string in between the given tags/strings

I'm also interested in C++ code to achieve the same. I'm using Eclipse for Java and Code::Blocks for my C++ programming.

Thanks in advance.