Why is Spring de-coding + (the plus character) on application/json get requests? and what should I do about it?

Question

I have a Spring application that receives a request like http://localhost/foo?email=foo+bar@example.com. This triggers a controller that roughly looks like this

Answer 1

If you have this request:

http://localhost/foo?email=foo+bar@example.com

then the original is foo bar@example.com. If you say the original should be foo+bar@example.com then the request should be:

http://localhost/foo?email=foo%2Bbar@example.com

So Spring is working as supposed to. Maybe on client you should check if the URI is properly encoded. The client-side URL encoding is responsible for building a correct HTTP request.

See encodeURI() if you generate the request in JavaScript or uriToString() if you generate the request in Spring.

Build your request string (the part after ?), without any encoding, with unencoded values like foo+bar@email.com, and only in the end, before actually using it in GET, encode all of it with whatever is available on the client platform. If you want to use POST then you should encode it according to the MIME type of your choice.