Home/ Questions/Q 8700679
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-13T02:13:23+00:00

I’m playing a bit in Java with the URLDecoder class to analyze some urls,

  • 0

I’m playing a bit in Java with the URLDecoder class to analyze some urls, and I’ve hit an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a bug or expected behavior, so here it is.

Consider this URL:
https://id2.s.nfl.com/fans/mobile/login?gigyresp=true&city=S%u00e3o+Paulo%2c+Brazil&profileURL=…

URLDecoder is choking on the “São Paulo” part, especially the “ã” which seems to be encoded as “%u0”. Pretty much anything else seems to be handled fine, but this particular doesn’t.

I’m using the following:

URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8");

My stack trace is:

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: URLDecoder: Illegal hex characters in escape (%) pattern - For input string: "u0"
    at java.net.URLDecoder.decode(URLDecoder.java:173)

Any thoughts how I could make URLDecoder parse this correctly?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    URL enoding is done with octets %AB. Your encoding seems to be a mix of java string encoding \u00e3 and URL encoding like %xxxx, which is not valid.

    If you change the string to "S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil" and encode it with URLEncoder.encode(url, "UTF-8"), you will get S%C3%A3o+Paulo%2c+Brazil, which is perfectly decodable.

    • 0