How to encode java string to send web server URL

Posted in /  

How to encode java string to send web server URL
ramyashankar

Ramya Shankar
Last updated on December 3, 2024

    If you work on web applications, it is essential to know how to encode a String to pass it in URL so that it can be passed safely to a servlet or a CGI program. Once a string is encoded, it is safe and can be decoded at the receiver’s end. Java provides the URLEncoder class’s encode() method for this.

    URL encoding to handle special characters

    In a GET method, parameter values are passed as strings in the URL after the question mark (?). More than one parameter is separated using the ampersand (&) symbol. It is easy when a single string is passed, and HTML form appends it automatically:

    http://localhost:8080/myproj/MyServlet?name=joe&subject=math

    However, special characters in string should be appropriately handled, and encoding is the best way for it. The most common encoding scheme to encode Java String is ‘UTF-8’. Let us say you want to pass the parameters ‘joe april’ and ‘@math!\science\myfav90%’. The white space and characters like @, !, \, % cannot be sent as it is. URLEncoder class specifies rules for the same. As per the docs, white space is replaced by ‘+’, and other characters are first changed to one or more bytes using an encoding scheme (like UTF=8), and then each byte is then represented by 3-character string ‘%ab’. ab is the hexadecimal representation of the byte. For more information, check Javadocs .

    String param1 = "joe april";
    String param1Encoded = URLEncoder.encode(param1, "UTF-8");
    System.out.println("param1 after encoding:" + param1Encoded);
    
    String param2 = "@math!\\science\\myfav90%";
    String param2Encoded = URLEncoder.encode(param2, "UTF-8");
    System.out.println("param2 after encoding:" + param2Encoded);

    The output will be:

    param1 after encoding:joe+april
    param2 after encoding:%40math%21%5Cscience%5Cmyfav90%25

    Note that you have to add import java.net.URLEncoder; and catch or throw the exception UnsupportedEncodingException

    Conclusion

    The characters other than alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and some special characters like ".", "-", "*", and "_" are considered unsafe. The encode() method takes two arguments, the parameter to be encoded and the encoding scheme, which is almost always UTF-8. A similar class, URLDecoder, and its method decode() are used for the reverse process to get the original strings back.

    People are also reading:

    Leave a Comment on this Post

    0 Comments