How to do URL decoding in Java?

Question

In Java, I want to convert this:

https%3A%2F%2Fmywebsite%2Fdocs%2Fenglish%2Fsite%2Fmybook.do%3Frequest_type

To thi

Answer 1

public String decodeString(String URL)
    {

    String urlString="";
    try {
        urlString = URLDecoder.decode(URL,"UTF-8");
        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block

        }

        return urlString;

    }

Answer 2

This does not have anything to do with character encodings such as UTF-8 or ASCII. The string you have there is URL encoded. This kind of encoding is something entirely different than character encoding.

Try something like this:

try {
    String result = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8.name());
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    // not going to happen - value came from JDK's own StandardCharsets
}

Java 10 added direct support for Charset to the API, meaning there's no need to catch UnsupportedEncodingException:

String result = java.net.URLDecoder.decode(url, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

Note that a character encoding (such as UTF-8 or ASCII) is what determines the mapping of characters to raw bytes. For a good intro to character encodings, see this article.

Answer 3

I use apache commons

String decodedUrl = new URLCodec().decode(url);

The default charset is UTF-8