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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T06:15:08+00:00

In Java webapp, I need an automatic converter to convert String to use in

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In Java webapp, I need an automatic converter to convert String to use in a mailto link

By example, I have this String “S&D” will be display in a html correctly “S&D”. But now I need to have a mailto link in my web page.

<a href="mailto:?subject=my%20subject&body=S&amp;D">share</a>

its wrong character “&”, so I need to convert “&” to “%26”.

There is a library to do that?

I tried java.net.URLEncoder but she changed only the “&” not the “&” and she replace space ” ” by plus “+”
I tried java.net.URI but she did nothing for character “&”!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Quoting RFC 6068(thanks JB Nizet):

    When producing ‘mailto’ URIs, all spaces SHOULD be encoded as
    %20, and ‘+’ characters MAY be encoded as %2B. Please note that ‘+’
    characters are frequently used as part of an email address to
    indicate a subaddress, as for example in <bill+ietf@example.org>.

    Updated code:

    String subject = URLEncoder.encode("my subject", "utf-8").replace("+", "%20");
String body = URLEncoder.encode("S&D", "utf-8").replace("+", "%20");
// Email addresses may contain + chars
String email = "test@example.com".replace("+", "%2B");
String link = String.format("mailto:%s?subject=%s&body=%s", email, subject, body);
System.out.println(StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(link));

    Output:

    mailto:test@example.com?subject=my%20subject&amp;body=S%26D

    Which may be used in a link like so:

    <a href="mailto:test@example.com?subject=my%20subject&amp;body=S%26D">mail me</a>

    StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml(String str) from Apache Commons Lang.

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