WebDriver getCurrentUrl() returning malformed URI

Question

I'm involved in writing a (Java/Groovy) browser-automation app with Selenium 2 and FireFox driver.

Currently there is an issue with some URLs we find in the wild that are apparently using bad URI syntax. (specifically curly braces ({}), |'s and ^'s).

String url = driver.getCurrentUrl(); // http://example.com/foo?key=val|with^bad{char}acters

When trying to construct a java.net.URI from the string returned by driver.getCurrentUrl() a URISyntaxException is thrown.

new URI(url); // java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in query at index ...

Encoding the whole url before constructing the URI will not work (as I understand it).

The whole url is encoded, and it doesn't preseve any pieces of it that I can parse in any normal fashion. For example, with this uri-safe string, URI can't know the difference between a & as the query-string-param delimeter or %26 (its encoded value) in the content of a single qs-param.

String encoded = URLEncoder.encode(url, "UTF-8") // http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Ffoo%3Fkey%3Dval%7Cwith%5E%7Cbad%7Ccharacters
URI uri = new URI(encoded)
URLEncodedUtils.parse(uri, "UTF-8") // []

Currently the solution is, before constructing the URI, running the following (groovy) code:

["|", "^", "{", "}"].each {
    url = url.replace(it, URLEncoder.encode(it, "UTF-8"))
}

But this seems dirty and wrong.

I guess my question is multi-part:

1. Why does FirefoxDriver return a String rather than a URI?
2. Why is this String malformed?
3. What is best practice for dealing with this kind of thing?

Answer 1

We can partially encode query string parameters, as discussed in comments, it should work.

Other way is to use galimatias library:

import io.mola.galimatias.GalimatiasParseException;
import io.mola.galimatias.URL;

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws URISyntaxException {
        String example1 = "http://example.com/foo?key=val-with-a-|-in-it";
        String example2 = "http://example.com?foo={bar}";

        try {
            URL url1 = URL.parse(example1);
            URI uri1 = url1.toJavaURI();
            System.out.println(url1);
            System.out.println(uri1);

            URL url2 = URL.parse(example2);
            URI uri2 = url2.toJavaURI();
            System.out.println(url2);
            System.out.println(uri2);
        } catch (GalimatiasParseException ex) {
            // Do something with non-recoverable parsing error
        }
    }
}

Output:

http://example.com/foo?key=val-with-a-|-in-it
http://example.com/foo?key=val-with-a-%7C-in-it
http://example.com/?foo={bar}
http://example.com/?foo=%7Bbar%7D