Question

I am reading text files (RDF) using the NxParser library.

I am getting lots of ‘percent encoded’ characters. My question is two fold:

1. Should I save the words with the encoding and ‘decode’ them when I want to display them, or should I decode them and then store them (I am using MySQL to store data (if that makes any difference))

2. How do I decode the reserved characters, I’ve been trying to find a library that can take some input and then print out a ‘nice’ version of the same word

I have tried replacing some of the characters with their ‘normal’ equivalent like so someString.replaceAll("%28","(").replaceAll("%29","). This works fine, but of course it’s time consuming to write and perhaps slow to run as well (if lots of replaceAll() are called).

Answer 1

Should I save the words with the encoding and ‘decode’ them when I want to display them […]?

I would save them “unencoded” and encode them when you want to display them. (Different (future?) display mechanisms may require different encodings!)

How do I decode the reserved characters, I’ve been trying to find a library that can take some input and then print out a ‘nice’ version of the same word

You should use URLDecoder for this purpose.

Example:

System.out.println(URLDecoder.decode("Hello %28 world", "UTF-8"));

Output:

Hello ( world