URLEncoder not able to translate space character

Question

This behaves as expected. The URLEncoder implements the HTML Specifications for how to encode URLs in HTML forms.

From the javadocs:

This class contains static methods for converting a String to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format.

and from the HTML Specification:

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows:

1. Control names and values are escaped. Space characters are replaced by `+'

You will have to replace it, e.g.:

System.out.println(java.net.URLEncoder.encode("Hello World", "UTF-8").replace("+", "%20"));

A space is encoded to %20 in URLs, and to + in forms submitted data (content type application/x-www-form-urlencoded). You need the former.

Using Guava:

dependencies {
     compile 'com.google.guava:guava:23.0'
     // or, for Android:
     compile 'com.google.guava:guava:23.0-android'
}

You can use UrlEscapers:

String encodedString = UrlEscapers.urlFragmentEscaper().escape(inputString);

Don't use String.replace, this would only encode the space. Use a library instead.

This class perform application/x-www-form-urlencoded-type encoding rather than percent encoding, therefore replacing with + is a correct behaviour.

From javadoc:

When encoding a String, the following rules apply:

• The alphanumeric characters "a" through "z", "A" through "Z" and "0" through "9" remain the same.
• The special characters ".", "-", "*", and "_" remain the same.
• The space character " " is converted into a plus sign "+".
• All other characters are unsafe and are first converted into one or more bytes using some encoding scheme. Then each byte is represented by the 3-character string "%xy", where xy is the two-digit hexadecimal representation of the byte. The recommended encoding scheme to use is UTF-8. However, for compatibility reasons, if an encoding is not specified, then the default encoding of the platform is used.

Encode Query params

org.apache.commons.httpclient.util.URIUtil
    URIUtil.encodeQuery(input);

OR if you want to escape chars within URI

public static String escapeURIPathParam(String input) {
  StringBuilder resultStr = new StringBuilder();
  for (char ch : input.toCharArray()) {
   if (isUnsafe(ch)) {
    resultStr.append('%');
    resultStr.append(toHex(ch / 16));
    resultStr.append(toHex(ch % 16));
   } else{
    resultStr.append(ch);
   }
  }
  return resultStr.toString();
 }

 private static char toHex(int ch) {
  return (char) (ch < 10 ? '0' + ch : 'A' + ch - 10);
 }

 private static boolean isUnsafe(char ch) {
  if (ch > 128 || ch < 0)
   return true;
  return " %$&+,/:;=?@<>#%".indexOf(ch) >= 0;
 }

Hello+World is how a browser will encode form data (application/x-www-form-urlencoded) for a GET request and this is the generally accepted form for the query part of a URI.

http://host/path/?message=Hello+World

If you sent this request to a Java servlet, the servlet would correctly decode the parameter value. Usually the only time there are issues here is if the encoding doesn't match.

Strictly speaking, there is no requirement in the HTTP or URI specs that the query part to be encoded using application/x-www-form-urlencoded key-value pairs; the query part just needs to be in the form the web server accepts. In practice, this is unlikely to be an issue.

It would generally be incorrect to use this encoding for other parts of the URI (the path for example). In that case, you should use the encoding scheme as described in RFC 3986.

http://host/Hello%20World

More here.

Just been struggling with this too on Android, managed to stumble upon Uri.encode(String, String) while specific to android (android.net.Uri) might be useful to some.

static String encode(String s, String allow)

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/Uri.html#encode(java.lang.String, java.lang.String)