I am building a site which submits a url to a servlet for analysis purposes. On the client side, I submit the url as a parameter that is encoded. For example...
I can't reproduce your problem on Tomcat 6.0.29. There's more at matter. Maybe a Filter in the chain which is doing something with the request object?
Anyway, here's a SSCCE in flavor of a single JSP:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.site.com%3Fparam1%3D1%26param2%3D2">click here</a>
<p>URL: ${param.url}
</body>
</html>
Copy'n'paste'n'run it and click the link. Right here I see the following result:
click here
URL: http://www.site.com?param1=1¶m2=2
The same is reproducible with a simple servlet like this which is invoked directly by browser address bar:
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
response.getWriter().write(request.getParameter("url"));
}
Tomcat is by the way configured with URIEncoding="UTF-8"
in HTTP connector, but even with ISO-8859-1
(which is the default), the behaviour is -as expected in this particular case- the same.