Question

I’m trying to send post request to web service which have an email and password. When I add special character @ in parameter (i.e [e-mail]) it is converted to %40. I have checked server side, they are getting %40 instead of @.

Here is my code:

    HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
                            HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(
                                    "http://www.myurl.com/requesthandler.ashx");
                            // from list to arraylist
                            ArrayList<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(
                                    3);
                            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("txtUserId",
                                    "[e-mail]"));
                            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("txtPassword",
                                    "blahblah"));
                            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("type", "login"));
try {
                        httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(
                                nameValuePairs));

                    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e1) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e1.printStackTrace();
                    }

                    // Execute HTTP Post Request
                    HttpResponse response = null;
                    try {
                        response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
                    } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Log.i("Client Protocol Excption", e + "");
                    } catch (IOException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Log.i("IO Exception", e + "");
                    }
                    String responseText = null;
                    try {
                        responseText = EntityUtils.toString(response
                                .getEntity());
                    } catch (ParseException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Log.i("Parse Exception", e + "");

                    } catch (IOException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                        Log.i("IO Exception 2", e + "");

                    }
                    String afterDecode = null;

                    try {
                        afterDecode = URLDecoder.decode(responseText, "UTF-8");
                    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }

                    Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, afterDecode,
                            Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

I know that

httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(
                            nameValuePairs));

This encodes the URL in UTF-8. So how can I achieve my goal so that the server should receive the @ symbol instead of the %40? Or is there any method to POST the request without using setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs))? Or is there any method so that we can send the decoded version of POST request?

Answer 1

You are posting URL-encoded form parameters, but probably not setting the content-type to “x-www-form-urlencoded”. This is needed so that the server will know how to interpret the posted parameters. Try adding this line before calling httppost.setEntity():

httppost.addHeader("Content-Type","application/x-www-form-urlencoded");

EDIT: If you don’t want to use the URL-encoding, you can simply post a string

If you don’t want to URL-encode the POST body, you can do this instead:

// Create post body as name/value pairs in form format
String postBody = "txtUserId=[e-mail]&txtPassword=blahblah&type=login";
try {
    httppost.setEntity(new StringEntity(postBody));
}