Question

In my understanding by default browsers encode reserved characters and
non-alphanumeric characters with three bytes/characters:

        `%HH', a percent sign and two hexadecimal    
         digits representing the ASCII code of the character.

So on server side lets say
queryString is the query string before decoding
and :

decodedQueryString = URLDecoder.decode(queryString , "Utf-8");

at this point the value of the expression:

decodedQueryString.length() < queryString.length();

should usually be true , am I right ?

Answer 1

Almost. If the undecoded query string doesn’t contain any escaped characters, the lengths will be equal. I can’t think of any case where, after decoding, the query string would be longer.