What type of Charset URL encoding should this use?

Question

I have a rest api and when I enter a URL in the browser, part of the URL looks like this:

...where+%7B%0D%0A%3Fs+<http%3A%2F%2F...

which actually stands for

...where { ?s <http://...

Now, when I have to call the same URl through my JAVA code, I know of URLEncoder using which I am encoding the URL. When I use "UTF-8" format, the "<" in the URL is also encoded as %3C.

Is there any way of encoding such that the "<" and ">" are retained while other parts of the URL such as spaces and others are encoded properly.

I suspect that it doesn't really matter if the "<" is encoded as %3C or is sent literally. — Ted Hopp
– Ted Hopp, Commented Jan 29, 2013 at 8:07

Julian Reschke · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-29 11:16:46Z

2

The reason "<" get's encoded is because it's not a legal URI character. It has nothing to do with the character encoding.

If the server doesn't treat the escape sequence correctly then it needs to get fixed.

edited Jan 29, 2013 at 11:16

answered Jan 29, 2013 at 9:36

Julian Reschke

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1 Comment

Jilles van Gurp Over a year ago

These characters are supposed to be encoded and not considered url safe characters: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding. Any urlencoder implementation that doesn't encode these is broken. Browsers tend to be somewhat forgiving with encoding what you enter in the url bar and mostly it doesn't actually break stuff.

TechSpellBound · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-29 08:03:32Z

0

You can do

URLEncoder.encode(urlString).replace("%3C", "<")

answered Jan 29, 2013 at 8:03

TechSpellBound

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Avinash Nair · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-29 08:29:02Z

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URLEncoder.encode(url, "UTF-8").replaceAll("%3C", "<").replaceAll("%3E", ">");

answered Jan 29, 2013 at 8:29

Avinash Nair

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