Question

My URL String has two parts, first one is

http://abcabc.com/xyz/mmm/lorum/

Second is “abc def ghi”, Here for last part I use

URLEncoder.encode("abc def ghi","utf-8");

This returns me “abc+def+ghi”

Final URL becomes

http://abcabc.com/xyz/mmm/lorum/abc+def+ghi

Which is wrong, It should be

http://abcabc.com/xyz/mmm/lorum/abc%20def%20ghi

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

From wikipedia:

When data that has been entered into HTML forms is submitted, the form field names and values are encoded and sent to the server in an HTTP request message using method GET or POST, or, historically, via email.2 The encoding used by default is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with “+” instead of “%20”

So + is a valid way of encoding a space.

BTW, this is clearly documented:

Utility class for HTML form encoding. This class contains static methods for converting a String to the application/x-www-form-urlencoded MIME format

[…]

The space character ” ” is converted into a plus sign “+”.