Question

I have a simple program which tries to decode an encoded URL. But for some reason this doesn’t seem to be working. Would anybody have any idea why this is happening? I have spent hours but haven’t been able to figure it out.

Here is the program:

import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.URLDecoder;

public class DecodeTest {

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String encodedUrl = "aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWUuY29tL3dlYi9teWFjY291bnQvYWNjb3VudF9ob21lLmpzcA";
    String decodedUrl = "";

    try {
        decodedUrl = URLDecoder.decode(encodedUrl, "UTF-8");
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    System.out.println("String: " + decodedUrl);
    }
}

The output is as follows:

 String: aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWUuY29tL3dlYi9teWFjY291bnQvYWNjb3VudF9ob21lLmpzcA

This is the same encoded string.

Answer 1

are you sure you don’t need a base64 decoder? this is the expect result. URL encoding/decoding is something like transforming spaces in %20 and stuff like that

%0D%0AGood+luck%28you%27ll+need+it%29 

into

Good luck (you'll need it)

base64 decoding will give you

https://www.ae.com/web/myaccount/account_home.jsp

for your input