HTTP URL Address Encoding in Java

Question

My Java standalone application gets a URL (which points to a file) from the user and I need to hit it and download it. The problem I am facing is that I am not able to encod

Answer 1

Yeah URL encoding is going to encode that string so that it would be passed properly in a url to a final destination. For example you could not have http://stackoverflow.com?url=http://yyy.com. UrlEncoding the parameter would fix that parameter value.

So i have two choices for you:

1. Do you have access to the path separate from the domain? If so you may be able to simply UrlEncode the path. However, if this is not the case then option 2 may be for you.

2. Get commons-httpclient-3.1. This has a class URIUtil:

   System.out.println(URIUtil.encodePath("http://example.com/x y", "ISO-8859-1"));

This will output exactly what you are looking for, as it will only encode the path part of the URI.

FYI, you'll need commons-codec and commons-logging for this method to work at runtime.