JAX-RS @PathParam How to pass a String with slashes, hyphens & equals too

Question

I am new to JAX-RS and I am trying to use Jersey to build a simple RESTful Webservice.

I have 2 questions. Please clarify these:

1. I am trying to have

Answer 1

This is how you enable slashes in path params:

@Path("{inchiname : .+}")
public String get3DCoordinates(@PathParam("inchiname")String inchiName) 

Answer 2

The parameters should be URL encoded. You can use java.net.URLEncoder for this.

String encodedParam = URLEncoder.encode(unencodedParam, "UTF-8");

The / will then be translated to %2F.

Answer 3

Tomcat does not Accept %2F in URLs: http://tomcat.apache.org/security-6.html. You can turn off this behavior.

Answer 4

The following should work:

@GET
@Path("{inchiname : (.+)?}")
@Produces("application/xml")
public String get3DCoordinates(@PathParam("inchiname")String inchiName) {

(This is sort of mentioned in another answer and comment, I'm just explicitly putting it in a separate answer to make it clear)

Answer 5

I got this to work using @QueryParam() rather than @PathParam.

@Path("/inchi")
public class InChIto3D {
    @GET
    //@Path("{inchiname}")
    @Produces("application/xml")
    public String get3DCoordinates(@QueryParam("inchiname") String inchiName) {
          String ne="";
          try{
              URL eutilsurl = new URL(
                      "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?"
                      + "db=pccompound&term=%22"+inchiName+"%22[inchi]");
              BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
                                new InputStreamReader(eutilsurl.openStream()));
             String inputline;
             while ((inputline=in.readLine())!=null)
                 ne=ne+inputline;
          }catch (MalformedURLException e1) {
          }catch (IOException e2){
          }
          return ne;
    }
}

Thus the URL structure would be like this http://myrestservice.com/rest/inchi?inchiname=InChIhere

With @PathParam I read in the API that it will not accept slashes. I am wondering if I can use any Regular Expression in @Path just to ignore all slashes in the string that would be entered in quotes" ".