How to do URL decoding in Java?

In Java, I want to convert this:

https%3A%2F%2Fmywebsite%2Fdocs%2Fenglish%2Fsite%2Fmybook.do%3Frequest_type

To this:

https://mywebsite/docs/english/site/mybook.do&request_type

This is what I have so far:

class StringUTF 
{
    public static void main(String[] args) 
    {
        try{
            String url = 
               "https%3A%2F%2Fmywebsite%2Fdocs%2Fenglish%2Fsite%2Fmybook.do" +
               "%3Frequest_type%3D%26type%3Dprivate";

            System.out.println(url+"Hello World!------->" +
                new String(url.getBytes("UTF-8"),"ASCII"));
        }
        catch(Exception E){
        }
    }
}

But it doesn't work right. What are these %3A and %2F formats called and how do I convert them?

Solution 1:

This does not have anything to do with character encodings such as UTF-8 or ASCII. The string you have there is URL encoded. This kind of encoding is something entirely different than character encoding.

Try something like this:

try {
    String result = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name());
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    // not going to happen - value came from JDK's own StandardCharsets
}

Java 10 added direct support for Charset to the API, meaning there's no need to catch UnsupportedEncodingException:

String result = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

Note that a character encoding (such as UTF-8 or ASCII) is what determines the mapping of characters to raw bytes. For a good intro to character encodings, see this article.

Solution 2:

The string you've got is in application/x-www-form-urlencoded encoding.

Use URLDecoder to convert it to Java String.

URLDecoder.decode( url, "UTF-8" );

Solution 3:

This has been answered before (although this question was first!):

"You should use java.net.URI to do this, as the URLDecoder class does x-www-form-urlencoded decoding which is wrong (despite the name, it's for form data)."

As URL class documentation states:

The recommended way to manage the encoding and decoding of URLs is to use URI, and to convert between these two classes using toURI() and URI.toURL().

The URLEncoder and URLDecoder classes can also be used, but only for HTML form encoding, which is not the same as the encoding scheme defined in RFC2396.

Basically:

String url = "https%3A%2F%2Fmywebsite%2Fdocs%2Fenglish%2Fsite%2Fmybook.do%3Frequest_type";
System.out.println(new java.net.URI(url).getPath());

will give you:

https://mywebsite/docs/english/site/mybook.do?request_type

Solution 4:

%3A and %2F are URL encoded characters. Use this java code to convert them back into : and /

String decoded = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8");

Solution 5:

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