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Asked: 2026-05-30T08:04:03+00:00

I recently came across a server that’s sending a Location header (for a redirect)

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I recently came across a server that’s sending a Location header (for a redirect) that looks like this:

Location: http://www.example.com/something.ext?auth=123|123

When I try to use this in my Java program it complains about an “Illegal character in query” and fails.

So is the server doing something incorrect? Is this legal?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use escapes:

    | is escaped with %7C, so your URL becomes:

    Location: http://www.example.com/something.ext?auth=123%7C123

    Location header as per HTTP/1.1 is defined as:

    Location       = "Location" ":" absoluteURI

    Per HTTP/1.1:

    For definitive information on URL syntax and semantics, see "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax and Semantics," RFC 2396

    RFC 2396 is obsoleted by RFC 3986, which requires escaping of some characters (see the RFC for the definitive information). It’s the responsibility of the source to provide the correct URL, so yes – you are responsible to provide a correctly escaped URL in this case.

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