HttpServletRequest variable with slash vs %2f

Question

Here is my controller:

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value="/test/**", headers="Accept=*/*")
public @ResponseBody ResponseEntity<byte[]> getRequest(HttpServletRequest request) 
{
        System.out.println((String) request.getAttribute( HandlerMapping.PATH_WITHIN_HANDLER_MAPPING_ATTRIBUTE ));
}

Whenever I want to create GETrequest looking like this: localhost:8080/test/some/request/given/in My system out write in console:

some/request/given/in

As I want it to. Problem comes when I have instead of slash - / symbol %2F or %2f. When I have those symbols in my path request is not handled by controller at all.

Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

Typically most of the application server will not not treat %2F as / if %2F is found in URL. But as the specs declare %2F is one of the ways a path delimiter can be specified, for handling this scenario, tomcat provides system level property

For tomcat, if

org.apache.tomcat.util.buf. UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH = true

then %2F and %5C will be permitted as path delimiters. Refer to the documentation. This can be set as JAVA_OPTS in tomcat batch files as follows

set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% %LOGGING_CONFIG%   -Dorg.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH=true

This is specifically for Tomcat. I am sure there would be similar arrangement for other application servers as well.

Answer 2

You need to use URL encoder and decoder to send the path params with special chars such as / and -. In your server side code, you just need to put:

String result = URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8");

and then fetch the params.