Encoding URL query parameters in Java

Unfortunately, URLEncoder.encode() does not produce valid percent-encoding (as specified in RFC 3986).

URLEncoder.encode() encodes everything just fine, except space is encoded to "+". All the Java URI encoders that I could find only expose public methods to encode the query, fragment, path parts etc. - but don't expose the "raw" encoding. This is unfortunate as fragment and query are allowed to encode space to +, so we don't want to use them. Path is encoded properly but is "normalized" first so we can't use it for 'generic' encoding either.

Best solution I could come up with:

return URLEncoder.encode(raw, "UTF-8").replaceAll("\\+", "%20");

If replaceAll() is too slow for you, I guess the alternative is to roll your own encoder...

EDIT: I had this code in here first which doesn't encode "?", "&", "=" properly:

//don't use - doesn't properly encode "?", "&", "="
new URI(null, null, null, raw, null).toString().substring(1);

java.net.URLEncoder.encode(String s, String encoding) can help too. It follows the HTML form encoding application/x-www-form-urlencoded.

URLEncoder.encode(query, "UTF-8");

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On the other hand, Percent-encoding (also known as URL encoding) encodes space with %20. Colon is a reserved character, so : will still remain a colon, after encoding.