URLEncoder

java.net.URLEncoder Example

In this example we shall show you how to make use of URLEncoder class. URLEncoder is a utility class for HTML form encoding, contains static methods for converting a string to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format. This class is very useful to encode URL query string values.

 

 

 

 

When encoding a string, the following rules apply:

  • The alphanumeric characters “a” through “z”, “A” through “Z” and “0” through “9” remain the same.
  • The special characters “.”, “-“, “*”, and “_” remain the same.
  • The space character ” ” is converted into a plus sign “+”.
  • All other characters are unsafe and are first converted into one or more bytes using some encoding scheme. Then each byte is represented by the 3-character string “%xy”, where xy is the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the byte.

Below example shows how to encode URL content in java using URLEncoder.

Example:

URLEncoderTest.java
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.URLEncoder;

/**
 * @author ashraf_sarhan
 * 
 */
public class URLEncoderTest {

	
	/**
	 * The main method.
	 *
	 * @param args the arguments
	 */
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		try {

			String string = "The string ü@foo-bar";

			String encodedString = URLEncoder.encode(string, "UTF-8");

			System.out.println("Encoded String: " + encodedString);

		} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

}

In the above example using UTF-8 as the encoding scheme, the string “The string ü@foo-bar” would get converted to “The+string+%C3%BC%40foo-bar” because in UTF-8 the character ü is encoded as two bytes C3 (hex) and BC (hex), and the character @ is encoded as one byte 40 (hex).

Tip

  • Method encode(String s) has been deprecated with encode(String s, String enc) now being the only available method.
  • The recommended encoding scheme to use is UTF-8. However, for compatibility reasons, if an encoding is not specified, then the default encoding of the platform is used.

3. Download the Source Code of this example:

This was an example of how to use URLEncoder class.

Download
You can download the full source code of this example here: java.net.URLEncoder Example Code

Ashraf Sarhan

Ashraf Sarhan is a passionate software engineer, an open source enthusiast, has a Bsc. degree in Computer and Information Systems from Alexandria University. He is experienced in building large, scalable and distributed enterprise applications/service in multiple domains. He also has a keen interest in JavaEE, SOA, Agile and Big Data technologies.
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