Question

This seems like an extremely easy problem but alas I cannot figure it out nor find a solution anywhere else. I’m concatenating a string that has a % within and for some reason it adds the number 25 after the %. Anyone know of a solution to this easy problem?

String buttonCheck = "%26" + DATABASE.getValue("buttonCheck") + "%26";

Comes out to

"%2526value%2526"

EDIT: It has become apparent that the issue is actually within URL encoding and I will add more relevant data to the issue.

I am developing an Android App that parses HTML from a site and allows the user to interact with it through the Android UI. I am having an issue with encoding % into a parameter for a form.

public class CLASS extends Activity
{
     DefaultHttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient;
     String url = "http://www.url.com"
     HttpRequestBase method = new HttpPost(url);
     List<NameValuePair> nvps = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
     nvps.add("buttoncheck", "%26" + DATABASE.getValue("buttonCheck") + "%26");
     //DATABASE is simply a class that handles a HashMap

     HttpPost methodPost = (HttpPost) method;
     methodPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nvps, HTTP.UTF_8));
     execute(method);
}

Rather than sending the form value of

buttoncheck=%26value%26

I get

buttoncheck=%2526value%2526

Answer 1

apparently the string went through “percent-encoding” when it becomes part of a URI.

If that’s the case, you should not do percent-encoding so early. instead

String buttonCheck = "&" + DATABASE.getValue("buttonCheck") + "&";

which will end up in the URI as

"%26value%26"