Home/ Questions/Q 3664808
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-19T01:41:18+00:00

I have a servlet that receives some POST data. Because this data is x-www-form-urlencoded,

  • 0

I have a servlet that receives some POST data. Because this data is x-www-form-urlencoded, a string such as サボテン would be encoded to サボテン.

How would I unencode this string back to the correct characters? I have tried using URLDecoder.decode("encoded string", "UTF-8"); but it doesn’t make a difference.

The reason I would like to unencode them, is because, before I display this data on a webpage, I escape & to & and at the moment, it is escaping the &s in the encoded string so the characters are not showing up properly.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Those are not URL encodings. It would have looked like %E3%82%B5%E3%83%9C%E3%83%86%E3%83%B3. Those are decimal HTML/XML entities. To unescape HTML/XML entities, use Apache Commons Lang StringEscapeUtils.

    Update as per the comments: you will get question marks when the response encoding is not UTF-8. If you’re using JSP, just add the following line to top of the page:

    <%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

    See for more detail the solutions about halfway this article. I would prefer using-UTF8-all-the-way above fiddling with regexps since regexps doesn’t prepare you for world domination.

    • 0