How to get absolute path with proper character encoding in Java?

Question

I'd like to get the absolute path of a file, so that I can use it further to locate this file. I do it the following way:

File file = new File(Swagger2MarkupConverterTest.class.getResource(
            "/json/swagger.json").getFile());   
String tempPath = file.getAbsolutePath();
String path = tempPath.replace("\\", "\\\\");

The path irl looks like this:

C:\\Users\\Michał Szydłowski\\workspace2\\swagger2markup\\bin\\json\\swagger.json

However, since it contains Polish characters and spaces, what I get from getAbsolutPath is:

C:\\Users\\Micha%c5%82%20Szyd%c5%82owski\\workspace2\\swagger2markup\\bin\\json\\swagger.json

How can I get it to do it the right way? This is problematic, because with this path, it cannot locate the file (says it doesn't exist).

Answer 1

The URL.getFile call you are using returns the file part of a URL encoded according to the URL encoding rules. You need to decode the string using URLDecoder before giving it to File:

String path = Swagger2MarkupConverterTest.class.getResource(
        "/json/swagger.json").getFile();

path = URLDecoder.decode(path, "UTF-8");

File file = new File(path);