Encoding URL query parameters in Java

Question

How does one encode query parameters to go on a url in Java   I know  this seems like an obvious and already asked question   There are two subtleties I m not sure of    Should spaces be encoded on the url as     or as   20    In chrome if I type in  http   google com foo  bar me  chrome changes it to be encoded with  20 Is it necessary correct to encode colons     as  3B   Chrome doesn t    Notes    java net URLEncoder encode doesn t seem to work  it seems to be for encoding data to be form submitted  For example  it encodes space as   instead of  20  and encodes colon which isn t necessary  java net URI doesn t encode query parameters

User · Answer

The built in Java URLEncoder is doing what it's supposed to, and you should use it.

A "+" or "%20" are both valid replacements for a space character in a URL. Either one will work.

A ":" should be encoded, as it's a separator character. i.e. http://foo or ftp://bar. The fact that a particular browser can handle it when it's not encoded doesn't make it correct. You should encode them.

As a matter of good practice, be sure to use the method that takes a character encoding parameter. UTF-8 is generally used there, but you should supply it explicitly.

URLEncoder.encode(yourUrl, "UTF-8");

User · Answer

Unfortunately  URLEncoder encode   does not produce valid percent-encoding  as specified in RFC 3986    URLEncoder encode   encodes everything just fine  except space is encoded to      All the Java URI encoders that I could find only expose public methods to encode the query  fragment  path parts etc  - but don t expose the  raw  encoding  This is unfortunate as fragment and query are allowed to encode space to    so we don t want to use them  Path is encoded properly but is  normalized  first so we can t use it for  generic  encoding either   Best solution I could come up with   return URLEncoder encode raw   UTF-8   replaceAll          20      If replaceAll   is too slow for you  I guess the alternative is to roll your own encoder     EDIT  I had this code in here first which doesn t encode        amp        properly     don t use - doesn t properly encode        amp        new URI null  null  null  raw  null  toString   substring 1

User · Answer

String param  2019-07-18 19 29 37   param   27  param trim   replace        20     27     I observed in case of Datetime  Timestamp   URLEncoder encode param  UTF-8   does not work

User · Answer

if you have only space problem in url  I have used below code and it work fine  String url  URL myUrl   new URL url replace       20       example   url is      www xyz com para hello sir   then output of muUrl is      www xyz com para hello 20sir

User · Answer

It is not necessary to encode a colon as  3B in the query  although doing so is not illegal   URI           scheme     hier-part       query         fragment   query            pchar               pchar           unreserved   pct-encoded   sub-delims             unreserved      ALPHA   DIGIT    -                    pct-encoded         HEXDIG HEXDIG sub-delims                    amp                                                     It also seems that only percent-encoded spaces are valid  as I doubt that space is an ALPHA or a DIGIT  look to the URI specification for more details

User · Answer

java net URLEncoder encode String s  String encoding  can help too  It follows the HTML form encoding application x-www-form-urlencoded   URLEncoder encode query   UTF-8        On the other hand  Percent-encoding  also known as URL encoding  encodes space with  20  Colon is a reserved character  so   will still remain a colon  after encoding

User · Answer

EDIT  URIUtil is no longer available in more recent versions  better answer at Java - encode URL or by Mr  Sindi in this thread      URIUtil of Apache httpclient is really useful  although there are some alternatives  URIUtil encodeQuery url        For example  it encodes space as     instead of   20    Both are perfectly valid in the right context  Although if you really preferred you could issue a string replace

[java] Encoding URL query parameters in Java

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