How to convert map to url query string?

Question

Do you know of any utility class/library, that can convert Map into URL-friendly query string?

Example:

I have a map:

\"param1\"=12,
\"param2         


        

Answer 1

Update June 2016

Felt compelled to add an answer having seen far too many SOF answers with dated or inadequate answers to very common problem - a good library and some solid example usage for both parse and format operations.

Use org.apache.httpcomponents.httpclient library. The library contains this org.apache.http.client.utils.URLEncodedUtils class utility.

For example, it is easy to download this dependency from Maven:

 
    org.apache.httpcomponents
    httpclient
    4.5
 

For my purposes I only needed to parse (read from query string to name-value pairs) and format (read from name-value pairs to query string) query strings. However, there are equivalents for doing the same with a URI (see commented out line below).

// Required imports

import org.apache.http.NameValuePair;
import org.apache.http.client.utils.URLEncodedUtils;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.net.URLDecoder;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;

// code snippet

public static void parseAndFormatExample() throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
        final String queryString = "nonce=12345&redirectCallbackUrl=http://www.bbc.co.uk";
        System.out.println(queryString);
        // => nonce=12345&redirectCallbackUrl=http://www.bbc.co.uk

        final List params =
                URLEncodedUtils.parse(queryString, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
        // List params = URLEncodedUtils.parse(new URI(url), "UTF-8");

        for (final NameValuePair param : params) {
            System.out.println(param.getName() + " : " + param.getValue());
            // => nonce : 12345
            // => redirectCallbackUrl : http://www.bbc.co.uk
        }

        final String newQueryStringEncoded =
                URLEncodedUtils.format(params, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);


        // decode when printing to screen
        final String newQueryStringDecoded =
                URLDecoder.decode(newQueryStringEncoded, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.toString());
        System.out.println(newQueryStringDecoded);
        // => nonce=12345&redirectCallbackUrl=http://www.bbc.co.uk
    }

This library did exactly what I needed and was able to replace some hacked custom code.