Apache Http Client - Stop Removing Double Slashes from URL

Question

I am using Apache HTTP Components Client 4.5.7 to request a URL that containing a double slash. When I look at the wire log, I see that the double slash was "fixed" to be only one slash. Unfortunately that is no desireable behaviour for me, as it will cause the request to fail.

Background: I am requesting resized images from Thumbor (an image resize server). A Thumbor URL will basically look like this:

this url will cause thumbor to download http://host.com/image.jpg and resize it to fit into 200x200 pixels.

The code looks like this:

HttpGet httpUriRequest = new HttpGet("http://thumbors-server/usafe/200x200/http://host.com/image.jpg");
CLIENT.execute(httpUriRequest, responseHandler); 

What httpclient sends to the server. however is this:

DEBUG o.a.h.headers     http-outgoing-1 >> GET /unsafe/300x300/http:/host.com/image1.jpg HTTP/1.1 
DEBUG o.a.h.headers     http-outgoing-1 >> Host: localhost:4002 
DEBUG o.a.h.headers     http-outgoing-1 >> Connection: Keep-Alive 
DEBUG o.a.h.headers     http-outgoing-1 >> User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.7 (Java/11.0.1) 
DEBUG o.a.h.headers     http-outgoing-1 >> Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate 

please note that http://host.com was replaced by http:/host.com (notice the missing second /). This will cause the request to fail.

How can I stop http client from "fixing" the url that I pass to it?

Answer 1

For a similar case I encountered, the best solution was to use URLEncoder.encode to url-encode the embedded URL.

In your example,

new HttpGet("http://thumbors-server/usafe/200x200/" + URLEncoder.encode("http://host.com/image.jpg", "UTF-8"))