Java - Convert String to valid URI object

Question

I am trying to get a java.net.URI object from a String. The string has some characters which will need to be replaced by their percentage escape sequences. But when I use URLEncoder to encode the String with UTF-8 encoding, even the / are replaced with their escape sequences.

How can I get a valid encoded URL from a String object?

http://www.google.com?q=a b gives http%3A%2F%2www.google.com... whereas I want the output to be http://www.google.com?q=a%20b

Can someone please tell me how to achieve this.

I am trying to do this in an Android app. So I have access to a limited number of libraries.

Answer 1

You might try: org.apache.commons.httpclient.util.URIUtil.encodeQuery in Apache commons-httpclient project

Like this (see URIUtil):

URIUtil.encodeQuery("http://www.google.com?q=a b") 

will become:

http://www.google.com?q=a%20b 

You can of course do it yourself, but URI parsing can get pretty messy...

Answer 2

Android has always had the Uri class as part of the SDK: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/Uri.html

You can simply do something like:

String requestURL = String.format("http://www.example.com/?a=%s&b=%s", Uri.encode("foo bar"), Uri.encode("100% fubar'd"));