Question

I have to use HttpClient 2.0 (can not use anything newer), and I am running into the next issue. When I use the method (post, in that case), it “codify” the parameters to the Hexadecimal ASCII code, and the “spaces” turned into “+” (something that the receiver don’t want).

Does anyone know a way to avoid it?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Even your browser does that, converting space character into +. See here http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/net/URLEncoder.html

It encodes URL, converts to UTF-8 like string.

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.

Also, see here http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.13.4.1

1. Control names and values are escaped. Space characters are replaced by +', and then reserved characters are escaped as described in [RFC1738], section 2.2: Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by%HH’, a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII code of the character. Line breaks are represented as “CR LF” pairs (i.e., `%0D%0A’).

2. The control names/values are listed in the order they appear in the document. The name is separated from the value by =' and name/value pairs are separated from each other by&’.

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To answer your question, if you do not want to encode. I guess, URLDecoder.decode will help you to undo the encoded string.