Java URL encoding of query string parameters

Question

Say I have a URL

http://example.com/query?q=

and I have a query entered by the user such as:

random word £500 bank

Answer 1

In my case i just needed to pass the whole url and encode only the value of each parameters. I didn't find a common code to do that so (!!) so i created this small method to do the job :

public static String encodeUrl(String url) throws Exception {
    if (url == null || !url.contains("?")) {
        return url;
    }

    List list = new ArrayList<>();
    String rootUrl = url.split("\\?")[0] + "?";
    String paramsUrl = url.replace(rootUrl, "");
    List paramsUrlList = Arrays.asList(paramsUrl.split("&"));
    for (String param : paramsUrlList) {
        if (param.contains("=")) {
            String key = param.split("=")[0];
            String value = param.replace(key + "=", "");
            list.add(key + "=" +  URLEncoder.encode(value, "UTF-8"));
        }
        else {
            list.add(param);
        }
    }

    return rootUrl + StringUtils.join(list, "&");
}

public static String decodeUrl(String url) throws Exception {
    return URLDecoder.decode(url, "UTF-8");
}

It uses org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils